


The 'I' in Beholding

by RedCytosine



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: AU after 159, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Asexual Character, Canon-Typical Self-Destructive Behavior, Elias is going down tho, Even though this is an AU I'm sure it'll somehow get jossed, Existentialism, Eye Trauma, Fix-It of Sorts, Hurt/Comfort, Jon has thoughts of self-harm/suicide, Like not everything is sunshine and rainbows but there's hope, M/M, No beta we die like archival assistants, Non-Consensual Body Modification, The Real Monster Was Capitalism, happy-ish ending, kinda similarly to when he got Daisy out from the Buried
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:20:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24099484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedCytosine/pseuds/RedCytosine
Summary: Martin sees Jonah's statement first.An AU from 160 in which Jon and Martin try to save the world and find their places in it. Monsters, humanity, and choices abound.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 89
Kudos: 340





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's fix-it o'clock so here's yet another AU of 160!

_ It began with Fear.  
_

_ Even before there was Consciousness, before Mind and Thought and Intention, there was Fear. When small things cowered from the hungry shadows that moved through the night, there was Fear. When the earth shook and broke, and when the storms came, and when the sun darkened and the sea boiled, there was Fear. Incoherent, raw, inexpressible Fear. And the Fear fed on itself and it Became.  _

_ And when there began to be Mind and Thought and Intention, the Fear grew and changed. It  _ divided.  _ From one Fear came many, for the minds that could build pyramids and skyscrapers could just as easily conjure new horrors to haunt their dreams. Thus, the fundamental Fears expanded and multiplied -- now that there was Mind, there could be Fear of its loss. Now that there was Companionship and Love, there could be Fear of isolation. Now that there was Intention and Choice, there could be Fear of being pulled down a path not of one’s own choosing. And in time there were fourteen Great Fears, waiting just beyond the edge of the world, waiting for reality to open its door and welcome them home.  _

_ Though the Fears could not step through the skin of existence and come into being themselves, they could reach out and warp pieces of reality. They built conduits and channels for their influence: places of power, objects that pulled creatures into their orbits. And they made monsters. Some had once been human. No longer. Now they were twisted and remade, and they served their gods a dreadful harvest. _

_ Monsters. Things with skin that melted and molded like wax. Things with wooden joints and painted-on smiles. Things with sharp ears and sharper teeth, things hollow with maggot-burrows and worm-tracks. Things with too many bones and limbs in all the wrong places. A nightmare gallery of aberrations, of predators one and all, feeding and fed by their patrons. Any humanity they might once have had was long gone. They had power and purpose and a place in the universe, and that was to devour in the names of their gods.  _

_ If someone were to walk down a particular road in rural Scotland on a particular day, the day the world was meant to end, they would have seen a monster there. It -- he -- didn’t look like an avatar of terror, not at first glance. He was slight and short, for one, and his long, dark hair was shot through with gray. He was sitting on a low stone fence, hunched over against the wet wind from the west, and wrapped in a coat that was clearly too large for him. He’d crossed his arms tight against his chest. His face was worn. It was the face of an older man than he really was, one who’d aged in more than years. His eyes were hollow and exhausted.  _

_ Indeed, the only really unusual thing about his appearance were the scars that traced along his jawline and up his cheeks: round, rough-edged scars. He looked like a plague survivor and maybe he was. If his arms hadn’t been crossed and his hands buried in his coat, the observer might have seen the scars continued there, too. In particular, his right palm was covered by a twisting, melting mark, like he’d once pressed his hand into a furnace. But people have scars, after all, and at most, the observer might have looked away, deliberately chosen not to stare. People have scars. It’s only natural.  _

_ No claws or sharpened teeth. All his bones in the right places, at least at first glance. Joints made of flesh and bone, not cunning wood and metal. The expression on his face was not painted on, though it was unmoving enough that it might as well have been done in oil and brushstroke.  _

_ It was the day the world was meant to end. A wind blew fitful gusts of rain down from the sky. The clouds had walled off the blue. Above were only shades of dark gray. Back to the wind, eyes seeing Nothing In Particular, the Archivist waited. _

  
  


“Jon?”

He looked up. Martin stood across the road. Yes. Martin. He shook off whatever reverie had gripped him. Sometimes his mind went places, these days. 

Martin’s efforts had paid off. He’d coaxed three shaggy brown cattle to come to him from across their pasture. They lifted their wet noses over the fence and raised them to Martin’s outstretched hand. 

“Look! I’ve never got them so close before!”

He felt a smile creep onto his face. He stood and crossed the one-lane road to join Martin. Up close, he could smell the soft and pungent cow scent, mixed with the wet earth and green grass and falling rain.

_ Bos taurus, the domestic cow, _ said Beholding.  _ Highland breed. Origins in the Scottish Highlands and Outer Hebrides. Raised primarily for meat.  _ It would tell him more if he asked, but he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want any interruptions. He was trying to have a nice walk with Martin. As close to a normal day as he could possibly get. So, as one of the cows snuffled at his palm, he asked a question that the Eye would never answer.

“Are they good cows?”

“Definitely,” said Martin with a grin. He pulled out a Polaroid camera -- they’d bought one in town for superstitious reasons, in part -- and snapped a picture. “I’d say first-tier cows.”

Said first-tier cows were rapidly losing interest in the two strangers at the edge of their field. They turned their shaggy heads and ambled off into their pasture. Martin tucked the developing in his pocket. 

“Ready to head back?” he asked.

Jon nodded. The clouds were getting darker and he had a feeling -- not Knowledge, just a feeling -- that they would soon open up. “All right.”

“We can head back through the village and check the mail,” Martin said. “Basira said she’d send us a package. Some, er, sustenance for you.”

Jon nodded. Thinking of the packet of statements Basira had promised made him feel a little faint. Or perhaps, not quite faint. More empty and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with proper food. He’d been so careful these last couple of weeks. He hadn’t dared enter the village by himself; he’d always made Martin act as chaperone. Maybe, with some statements in hand, he could finally relax, just a little. Not too much, of course. God forbid he forget what he was capable of. 

“Okay,” he said. Martin squeezed his shoulder and they turned to walk back.

The village of Hanford sat in the valley at the junction of three hills. It was framed on all sides by pastures, and the ungulate population was several times the human one. The village itself consisted of little more than a couple of tiny stores, a pub, and a post office. It was far from some picturesque ideal of a Scottish highland village, less rustic stonework and more cinderblocks. Jon kept his eyes down as they crossed the main street. Not that there were too many people out. In the time they’d been here hadn’t actually seen anyone who looked like they might have a statement to give. But better to be safe. 

Martin held the post office door for him and Jon chanced a look upward to give him a quick grin. They’d rented a postal box here. Better for anonymity than having Basira ship them packages under their own names. Martin dug around in his pockets, brought out the key, and unlocked the box. He removed a thick envelope, one of the padded kind meant for mailing more than just paper. On the front was an address label in Basira’s precise hand. 

The hunger dug itself in. Jon shut his eyes partway, stared resolutely at the floor, and wordlessly followed Martin out of the building. Once they reached the street, Martin passed him the envelope. 

“Looks tasty,” he said lightly. Jon managed another smile. “Do you think you’ll feel better?”

“I hope so.” He felt his steps quicken almost involuntarily. 

It was a twenty-minute walk by the winding roads up to Daisy’s safehouse. They saw plenty more good cows, though none, according to Martin, were quite as good as the ones who’d come over to greet him. 

At last, they reached the safehouse. It was an out-of-the-way cabin nestled between two large farms on either side. The roof was low and the furnishings basic, but at least it hadn’t been covered in blood when they’d arrived, which Jon was willing to count as a win. Coming from one of Daisy’s safehouses, it was no small thing. It had a bedroom and a kitchen, and Jon had taken to sitting in the kitchen window and watching the wind moving through the grasses outside. Just as they passed the front door, the rain began to pick up in earnest. Their timing was impeccable.

“I’ll make us some tea, yeah?” Martin didn’t wait for a response. He went to set down the package on the little kitchen table -- then paused. “Maybe Basira sent a note along? Can I?” He gestured at the envelope, clearly waiting for Jon’s permission.

“Go ahead.” Jon lowered himself into his now-customary chair by the window. Tea, statements, Martin, and word from Basira. So far, this day was going well enough. As well as could be hoped for.

Martin opened the envelope and withdrew a handful of tapes. “Guess she thought we could use these? Are they blank? For you to record with?”

“We don’t have any shortage of tapes.” This was true. Jon was fairly sure he’d never run out of tapes, not if he lived to be two hundred. Which, to be fair, was not an impossibility at this point. 

“Hmm.” Martin set the tapes down and pulled out a thick stack of papers. “Let’s hope these are some of the real statements. Okay, Hazel Rutter, something about a fire -- wait.”

Martin’s face fell. It was a curious thing to see: that bright expression he’d been wearing, the one that made Jon melt a little inside, seemed to be sucked away. He stood, frozen, for a long moment, his face still, and then it changed to a look of mounting horror. For a moment, he looked as though he wanted to throw the statement across the kitchen. His hand twitched. Then he gripped the paper tight and looked at Jon.

“What is it?” Jon leapt up from his chair. He held out his hand. Statements were his business, and if this one could so horrify Martin, he needed to see it immediately. He was used to all the awful things they described. Better Jon read it than Martin subject himself to something truly dreadful. 

But Martin drew back as if Jon had lunged at him brandishing a knife. He shook his head. “It’s… it’s a trap, Jon. You can’t read this one. It’s from Elias.”

Jon stopped. Slowly, deliberately,  _ forcefully, _ he pulled his hand back. It was hard, turning away from a statement like that. He clenched his fingers and took a steady breath.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read the whole thing, but it’s not from Hazel Rutter.” Now Martin took a measured step back, away from Jon. “It has her story as an intro, but then it just says, ‘Hello Jon,’ and goes on about how you won’t be able to stop reading if you start.”

Jon made himself sit down. His heart hammered and the room spun and he felt like he’d very much like to be sick. He braced himself against the table. This was bad. He had no idea why Elias had sent a fake statement, not yet, but the fact that it had happened at all, the fact he’d tried to trick Jon into reading it, meant that the floor had once again dropped out from under him. He thought he’d gotten to the bottom of it all, losing his humanity to an evil eldritch god, stopping the Unknowing, getting the truth about Leitner and Gertrude and the rest, but no. Nothing in his life could ever be that simple, and of course, of fucking course, there was yet another horrible rabbit hole to fall down. He should have known. 

“What does it say?” he asked. He heard the static under his voice and immediately regretted the compulsion, but it had come to him unbidden. 

“Okay, okay!” cried Martin. “I’m trying! It says that Elias --”

Jon made himself interrupt. “I’m sorry, Martin. Take your time. Read through it. And then, if you would,  _ please _ tell me what the statement says.” No static buzz. Martin nodded and hastily scanned through the page. His eyes got wider and wider as he read, and at one or two points he let out soft, involuntary gasps. 

“Oh god,” he said when he finished. Then, without further comment, he turned to the stove, turned on one of the burners, and thrust the edge of the statement into the flames. Jon flinched a little. Martin was destroying  _ knowledge,  _ destroying something that should be  _ his.  _ He gritted his teeth and held on while Martin, hand hovering over the kitchen garbage bin, burned the false statement to ash. 

“Okay,” Martin said when he finished. “Okay.” He took a deep breath and seemed to gather himself. Jon, not trusting himself to speak, nodded at him to proceed.

“Elias was trying to end the world,” said Martin. The words came out in a rush. “He was going to use you for a ritual that would have brought all the powers in at once. If you’d read that statement, I think you would have had to speak the words of the ritual.”

Outside, the rain drummed on the roof. A sheep called out in a nearby field, unaware that it had narrowly escaped Armageddon. 

“Oh,” said Jon. Then, “What?”

“He -- Elias and Gertrude thought that all the rituals would fail on their own. None of them would work because the powers aren’t really all that separate, so trying to bring in just one would never work. So he came up with a ritual to bring them  _ all _ in at once, and then I guess he wanted to rule the world from the Panopticon or something.

“He made a point of getting you, I don’t know,  _ marked _ somehow by all the entities. The last one was, well, it was the Lonely. But you’d run into all the others already, like the Buried and the Hive. That was supposed to be your preparation for the ritual. That and you being the Archivist, I guess.”

“Oh god.” Jon couldn’t think of what to say. Elias,  _ Jonah, _ had made him into a weapon to end the world. If he’d seen the statement first, if Martin hadn’t… well, Jon would have had no choice in the matter. Free will wasn’t of any more value to the Eye than it was to the other entities. So he’d been led down the path to the apocalypse ever since he’d taken the damn Archivist job. And he’d been blind to it all along. How could he still be this stupid?

Tears built behind his eyes. He screwed them shut, trying hard not to see. But Beholding, in its voiceless way, told him:  _ The Archivist is marked by fourteen entities. He received his first mark in childhood upon reading the book  _ A Guest for Mr. Spider _ and his second during the attack of the Corruption avatar known as Jane Prentiss on the Institute.  _ Now that Jon knew the outlines of Jonah’s plan, it seemed the Eye had no trouble filling in the details. It told him in clinical detail of how the past few years had marked him for each of the powers, how all his terror and trauma had been nothing more than a series of trials for Jonah’s benefit. A checklist on the way to ripping reality apart. 

When at last he Knew what Jonah had done, he felt Martin’s arm around his shoulders. He’d been holding Jon for a while now, it seemed. Jon pressed his face into Martin’s thick woolen jumper. 

“I’ve got you,” Martin said. “We stopped him. You didn’t read it and now it’s burnt.” 

_ “ You _ stopped him,” Jon mumbled through the tears. “If you hadn’t been here…”

“I  _ was _ here, though. I’m here with you.” Jon grabbed Martin and pulled him even closer. He thought of the Loneliness that had nearly claimed Martin and he dug his fingers even deeper into the jumper. 

They sat like that for a while as the rain pounded away on the window. At last, Jon loosened his grip on Martin and sat up with a shaky breath. 

After a moment, Martin asked, “So none of the individual rituals were ever going to work?” There was horror in his voice and Jon instantly knew why. 

“No, Martin. It doesn’t sound like it.” 

“So, Tim… and Michael Shelley… and everyone who died…”

“All for nothing.” 

“Oh.” 

There didn’t seem to be anything more to say. Martin and Jon held each other as the rain fell. In time, Martin made tea. What else could a person do under the circumstances?

Eventually, Martin looked through the rest of the statements while Jon sipped his tea. They were normal, or at least, as normal as statements ever got. A carnivorous plant, a haunted hospital, a book that stole the reader’s memories. Safe enough. Jon read the carnivorous plant one into the recorder and a little of the hunger dissipated. 

“Do you think the tapes are dangerous?” asked Martin.

“I don’t know,” Jon said honestly. “Maybe you should listen to them first, just… just in case. I’ve never felt the need to tell a statement that came from a tape, but…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. They’d had quite enough nasty surprises for one day and the stakes could not be higher. 

“Did Basira send the package and Elias just slipped that statement in? Or was it all Elias?”

“I don’t know,” Jon said again. It frustrated him, not knowing, and the Eye was not forthcoming. “I hope she’s okay. I hope Jonah didn’t get to her. She said she’d be off looking for Daisy when we last talked to her.”

“How did he find us? We got rid of all the eyes in here.” Truthfully, there hadn’t been many, sparsely-furnished as the apartment was. 

“Eyes in the village, I suppose,” Jon replied. “All he needed was our post box address. Couldn’t have been that hard for him.”

“We should give Basira a call, check on her, let her know what happened.”

“Good idea.” Jon could only nod along. He had gone beyond the limits of terror and grief. All he felt now was tired. But Martin, apparently, had something more left in him.

“And we’ve got to kill Elias.”

That jolted Jon out of his exhaustion. “Kill him? How?”

“I don’t know. But listen, once he figures out you never read the statement, he’s going to try again. You need statements, and any statement you come across could be a trap. Sooner or later, he’ll win. So we need to take him out. And he wants to end the world, for god’s sake. I think it’s pretty much justified.” 

This was not what Jon had expected to hear from Martin, the events in the Panopticon notwithstanding. He straightened himself and gave it some consideration. 

“Won’t we die if we kill him? Or just end up in the Panopticon ourselves?”

“I don’t know, but we can figure something out. For, I don’t know, for the sake of humanity.”

Humanity. Yes. Mustn’t forget about them. Through the exhaustion, through the sadness and fear just beneath it, rose something else. Anger, sharp and fierce. Jonah Magnus wanted Jon to dance to his tune? Wanted his own pet monster to rain down ruin and turn the world into Hell? Well, he’d created a monster all right. Maybe he’d have cause to regret it.

They needed a plan, and maybe even allies. They’d need far more information than they currently had. For now though, Jon needed more tea and a warm blanket and Martin’s arms around him as the wind picked up and rattled the windowpanes. They stayed like that as the night came on, warm and sheltered, for a moment, against the oncoming dark. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for any Americanisms, I will definitely miss some, and I'm not even gonna try to change my spelling.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh, all your comments and kudos have me grinning like the Stranger at a clown convention. 
> 
> Jon and Martin have some serious conversations. Specific warnings for this chapter: this is where Jon starts to have thoughts of self-harm/self-destructive behavior/suicide. The overall content/tone is fairly similar to some of the things he expresses in S4, particularly in MAG 132, "Entombed." Towards the end, there is a description of Flesh-y body horror and cruelty to animals, not perpetrated by any of our characters. Also, canon-typical discussion of eye trauma and canon-typical spiders.

At last, the morning came. Martin seemed to be enforcing some kind of normalcy. When Jon rose, shakily, from his dreams of many Eyes, Martin had already boiled water for tea and was cracking eggs into a bowl. 

“Good morning,” he told Jon. He’d found that bright expression somewhere. It looked a little brave, a little forced, maybe. 

“‘Morning,” Jon replied. “How are you?”

“Not great,” Martin told him. “But that’s no reason not to have breakfast.” He wouldn’t let Jon help him with the eggs or the toast. Jon could only sit at the table, near where they’d left the pile of statements and tapes. The sky had cleared overnight and the sun flooded the fields and pastures around the cabin. It was an almost absurdly beautiful morning. 

“I love you,” Jon said, and meant it. Martin pressed a kiss to his temple. 

The eggs and toast were excellent. The tea was, of course, beyond compare. Jon didn’t think he really needed to eat anymore, not like real people ate, but he could still enjoy it. It felt nice and almost normal, sitting at the kitchen table with Martin and eating breakfast. 

If they didn’t have to stop the apocalypse. If countless people hadn’t died for no reason at all, for rituals that were never going to succeed. If Jon weren’t an instrument of a voyeuristic entity of dread.

He finished the last of his toast and let his gaze drift over to the rest of the statements. Part of him wanted to record one now, but reasoned he should ration them a bit. It wasn’t as though Jonah would be sending them any more. Basira might try, but he could obviously intercept anything she sent. So they’d have to confront Jonah sooner or later, anyway, if only to keep Jon from starving.

Unless.

Unless he quit the Institute. He remembered in excruciating detail that conversation with Martin, after he’d found out about the Magnus Institute’s peculiar policy on resignation. Would that work? Having already fled to Scotland with no intention of returning, could he and Martin take the gruesome way out? 

He’d wondered this before, whether he could survive cutting himself off from the Ceaseless Watcher. This time, though, Beholding made an answer, and it was emphatic.  _ For the Archivist to cut himself off from the Eye is for the Archivist to die.  _

Well. That answered that question. He thought, then, of what he’d said to Daisy in the Buried. That maybe, getting himself killed or trapped forever would be better, all things considered. One less monster in the world. And Jonah wouldn’t be able to use him for his ritual. 

“Hey, what are you thinking about?”

Something of his train of thought must have shown on his face because Martin was staring straight at him. He considered waving it off, pretending he was fine. But Martin had Seen him in the Lonely. There wasn’t much point in hiding from him anymore. He tried to choose his words carefully.

“I was thinking about another way to solve this. It wouldn’t involve going after Jonah, and maybe you could… maybe you could make it out.”

“Are you actually suggesting again that we gouge our eyes out?”

“Well, maybe.” Confronted so directly, he had no other option but the truth.

“That’s not a good idea, Jon. Elias --”

“-- _Jonah_ \--”

“-- Fine, _Jonah_ will just get a new Archivist and start over, and eventually he’ll succeed. Unless we stop him. We actually have a chance to do something here.”

Slowly, Jon nodded. He decided not to mention the other thing he’d been thinking about. Best not to worry Martin. 

“Okay. What do you propose?”

“You’re the all-seeing one. You can’t just _Know_ what his weaknesses are?”

Jon let out a hollow laugh. “I wish I could.” As he lifted his mug of tea, his gaze drifted across the room. High on the kitchen wall, in one of the corners of the ceiling, was a small black spot perched in a cluster of web.

It looked like a normal spider. Like any of the dozens or hundreds that lived in any given house, especially out here in the country. Any old spider spinning its web. But Jon knew it wasn’t. He found himself rising from his chair. Martin saw him move and followed his gaze. 

“Jon, do you think…”

Jon didn’t reply. He was striding across the kitchen. He stared at the spider. “Get out.”

The spider didn’t move. It sat, bulbous and patient, in the center of its web and regarded him with eight blank eyes. Jon could out-Watch anything these days, though, and when he spoke again, his voice crackled with static. 

“Get. Out. Now.”

Something small and wispy tried to push back against him, but it was only one spider, and he was an angry avatar of Beholding. The Eye heightened its scrutiny, sharp as a needle. The spider never really had a chance. It broke before the intensity of his gaze and scutted out past the doorframe and through the hall. Jon Watched it as it slipped through a tiny crack under the front door, and then it was gone. The hypervigilance faded; the air pressure in the room returned to normal. 

“What was that?” asked Martin. He’d risen from the table and was scanning the corners of the room, apparently half-expecting Annabelle Cane herself to pop out from one of the cabinets. 

“The Web.” Jon’s voice was hard and flat. 

“I figured. But you just, you just told it to leave, and it --”

“I know.” 

“Like with Peter Lukas -- I didn’t know you even _could_ \--”

“ _I know._ ” Jon couldn’t keep the sharpness out of his voice. “I’m changing, and the thing I’ve Become is something awful and I can’t stop it. And now the Web is here and pulling strings, and I’m sick of things messing with me, sick of not having any real choices -- Elias said I had a choice to be the Archivist but what good’s that when I didn’t even know I was _making_ it, and now I’m supposed to end the world, and I won’t even have a choice in that, either.” He found he was nearly shouting by the end.

“I’m sorry,” said Martin. 

Jon sighed. “I’m… I’m sorry too, Martin. I shouldn’t take it out on you. It’s not fair.”

“You’re under a lot of stress.”

“You don’t have to make excuses for me.”

“Okay, I won’t. But Jon, I need you to talk to me. You need to tell me these things. You’re not _alone.”_ Martin caught himself a little on that last word, and Jon remembered how it had felt to lose him to Peter Lukas. 

“Of course not,” he said. And, “Thank you.” 

He finished his tea. It had gone lukewarm but was still inexpressibly perfect.

  
  


“So… should we talk about a plan?”

Jon had been staring out the window again. Beholding had been telling him about the ancient, collapsed temple that lay buried under the grass of the nearby farm. It was easy to get lost in Knowledge sometimes. 

He cleared his throat, got used to being back in his body. “For Jonah?”

“Yeah.”

“He’ll be at the Panopticon, no doubt. Maybe there’s a way to get around the binding, beat him at his own game.”

“You don’t Know, though.”

“No.”

“Maybe we can get some help.”

Jon glanced up at the corner of the room where the spider had been. “That’s sort of what I’m afraid of, Martin. Help from certain quarters, with strings attached.”

“You mean the Web?”

“Obviously it’s interested in what we’re doing here. It’s hard to know what it wants, but now that it’s been here, I’m worried that it’s trying to manipulate us.”

Martin paused for a moment, then said deliberately, “So what?”

“So what? Yet another malevolent entity, possibly the most dangerous of them all, is meddling with us, and you don’t care?”

“We don’t know why or how or what it wants. Anything we do could be playing right into its hands.”

“My point exactly.”

“Except… if whatever we do might be just another move in its game… then shouldn’t we just do what we would have done anyway? Not worry so much about the Web and just do the right thing?”

Jon blinked at him. 

“And anyway, I really don’t think the Web wants the world destroyed. From what I learned from Peter, it wouldn’t want Jonah’s ritual to succeed. It likes things as they are. Maybe we have mutual interests right now.”

 _Mr. Spider wants another guest for dinner. It is polite to knock._ Jon shuddered. “I have no mutual interests with that thing.”

Martin held up his hands. “Okay, okay. You scared it off, anyway. So let’s figure out what we’re doing.”

“Killing Jonah.”

“Yes, of course, Jon, I _know_ that. But how do we approach him? There’s not a lot of time, is there? Pretty soon he’ll notice that the world isn’t ending and he’ll figure out we stopped the ritual. He’ll have a backup plan. He’ll try again. We’ve got to move before he has a chance to put it in practice.”

“Okay.”

“But if we charge in blind, without a plan, we’re just asking to get killed, or worse. We need more information about him.”

“I’ve no idea how to go about getting that.” Jon closed his eyes momentarily and prodded at the door in the back of his mind, just to see if the Eye would give him the answer. It didn’t. “I think our plan has to be that, maybe, we don’t make it out of there, but we can take Jonah out with us.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“It’s us or the world. Or more specifically, _me_ or the world. You should get out while you can -- there’s nothing tying you to this; you shouldn’t have to suffer.”

“Shut up. Listen to me.” 

Jon shut up and listened.

“I have _everything_ to lose in this, specifically, _you._ You can be such an idiot sometimes, Jon. I love you. If we’re going out in this, I’m going to be right there. You came and got me from the Lonely. Why on earth would you think I wouldn’t follow you into this?” He took Jon’s hand as he said it. His eyes left no room for doubt. 

“All right,” said Jon. 

After that, it all came together rather quickly. If there was information to be had on Jonah’s weaknesses, it was likely in London. That meant going back to the Institute, which, according to Basira, was currently under heavy scrutiny by the police. They’d have to avoid getting caught, both by Jonah and by the law. Not to mention that Not-Sasha was probably still out there somewhere. 

Why did everything in Jon’s life have to be absurdly dangerous? Though truth be told, he was more worried for Martin. Empirical evidence showed that Jon could survive being blown up and having his heart stop for six months. Martin, having rejected the Lonely, had no such assurances. 

So he worried. He was good at it, always had been. He had it down to an art these days. Ever since he’d started in the Archives, there had always been plenty to worry about. It wasn’t just _him_ he was worried about anymore. During the old paranoia days, he’d been alone, and maybe in some ways that had been easier. No one else was at risk if he went charging into the tunnels, leaping before he looked. Now, though, he had so much more to lose. The world, for one. And Martin.

They packed up what few possessions they had. Everything fit into a couple of smallish suitcases. Jon uncovered no fewer than six tape recorders from around the cabin, despite the fact that he’d only brought one with him. He took his original and left the others to moulder away. If he needed more recorders, no doubt they’d find him on their own. 

They stopped at the phonebox in town to call Basira. It was a risk, of course, saying anything out loud in town where Jonah might be listening in. Martin and Jon agreed, though, that Basira needed to know. Martin called her number. Wedged in the phonebooth next to him, Jon heard the ringing drone on and on. No one answered. Finally, Basira’s voice came across the line, but it was only her voicemail greeting.

At the tone, Martin said brightly, “Hi Basira. It’s us. Just calling to check in, got a package recently. Thought it was from you, but there was some _extra_ _stuff_ thrown in there. Some, er, _interesting_ stuff. We’re on the road now, so hope to catch up with you soon! Okay! _Please_ take care! Bye!” He hung up and turned to Jon. “Do you think that was too vague, or not vague enough?”

“Sounded about right to me,” Jon said. “We’ll try her again later.” They’d long since ditched their respective mobiles. Dangerous things in their situation, and besides, this village had no service at all. They’d find another phonebox at some point, probably. Though phoneboxes were practically an endangered species these days. 

The closest train station was ten miles down the road in a larger town. Larger in that it possessed a few traffic lights and a small supermarket around the British Rail platform. They paid one of the local farmer’s sons, Graham Tremont, who ran an informal cab business that consisted solely of himself and his beat-up old Toyota, to drive them along the winding roads to the station. 

“I thought I saw you two around town,” he said jovially as they wound through the countryside.

“Just visiting,” Martin told him. “Couple of weeks vacation.” Jon, who was a terrible liar and knew it, kept his mouth shut. Best to let Martin do the talking. Besides, the hunger was eating at him today and it had him in a foul mood. 

“Where you from, then?”

“London.” 

Graham whistled. “Quite different from around here.”

“That was kind of the point.”

“Not much goes on up here compared to the city. Some find it boring, but I like it myself.”

“I certainly wouldn’t call it boring,” said Martin with a smile. 

“Ah, a city lad after my own heart.” Graham continued to chatter away about the state of the roads and the village council and the dreadful winter they’d had and what a hideous thing had happened to his father’s cattle last time it snowed…

That was a bad sign. Jon squeezed his eyes shut. Usually he could tell right away when someone had a statement, but occasionally they crept up on him. It was especially cruel to spring it as a surprise like this; he never would have gotten in the car if he’d known.

Martin must have seen the expression on his face. “Jon, are you all right?”

He’d read another statement just that morning, the one about the memory-stealing book. It had been dry and thin and _useless._ And the carnivorous plant statement had scarcely taken the edge off. Maybe Jonah just wanted him hungry. The Eye pressed into him. He bit his tongue. It didn’t help.

“We’ve got to…” he tried to say. _We’ve got to get out of this cab before I rip this man’s trauma out of him and haunt his dreams forever._ He had packed away the single tape recorder in his suitcase, which was now stowed in the trunk, but he felt his hand going to his coat pocket anyway, drawing out a fresh recorder, tape already loaded. Ready.

“What? Are you okay --” Martin started to say as he tried to grab Jon’s shoulders. But Jon was far gone now, the gaze of the Ceaseless Watcher running through him, and he heard himself say with a static crackle, _“Graham Tremont, tell me your story.”_

Martin couldn’t intervene after that. Nobody could, not even Jon. Graham kept his fingers on the wheel and his eyes on the road and he spoke into Jon’s tape recorder. Something had been killing his father’s cattle, and not in a good way. One at a time, found at the edges of fields, skin intact but somehow _boneless._ Whatever had taken them had taken their bones and left them, loose and misshapen. The first time he’d seen one, he’d felt sick. But it hadn’t just been one; it had happened again and again, and his father ran a small operation, couldn’t afford to keep losing cattle to bone-stealing things in the night. So they’d gotten out their shotguns, illegal but not too uncommon in these parts, and watched the fenceline at night, the whole family and their neighbors in shifts. And they’d seen nothing until one night, a cold and spiteful night with flurries of snow blasting in Graham’s eyes, they’d heard the lowing of terrified cows and sprinted as a group to the far side of the pasture. A shambling thing was crouched over a fallen cow. It plucked something through its prey’s skin, reaching past skin and hair and muscle like smoke, and drawing out a long white bone.

They’d run, of course. The thing hadn’t come back since that night, but it also hadn’t snowed since then, and Graham worried that in the winter, it would come back for the rest of the herd, and maybe the people in the house, too. And then he went quiet.

 _Statement ends,_ thought Jon. The Eye was satisfied; he could feel the hunger had gone. It left him feeling foul and cruel and weak all at once. Martin was staring at him in horror. Jon glanced up to the rear-view mirror where Graham, wide-eyed and shaking, kept a white-knuckle grip on the wheel.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked. 

“I’m sorry,” said Jon. He could never be sorry enough. 

“Jon.” Martin’s voice was hard. “We are going to talk about this later.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“What did you do?” demanded Graham.

“I asked for your story,” Jon said.

“It felt like…” Graham trailed off, apparently lost for words. Jon wondered if he’d throw them out of his car. Jon deserved that and more. But he didn’t, just clenched the steering wheel even harder and drove them the rest of the way to the train station in stony, frightened silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear, that's probably not a good sign.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sings in Hadestown* On the road to Hell there was a railroad line...
> 
> Encounters with old friends! And spiders!

Martin slipped Graham an extra twenty pounds at the station. The second they retrieved their suitcases from the trunk, he peeled away in a screech of tires. He turned the corner and was gone, no doubt relieved to be away from Jon and his tape recorder. Not that there was any real escape. Graham Tremont would soon be another face in his dreams, running from the Flesh-creature night after night as Jon Watched, unmoving, with a thousand eyes.

“Right,” Martin said. “Train’s due soon.”

“Are we not having that talk?”

“Not on this platform, we’re not. Now stay behind me and don’t look at anyone.” Jon dropped his gaze to the pavement, grabbed his suitcase, and followed Martin over to the station agent’s booth, where Martin purchased the train tickets. Their stock of cash was dwindling rapidly. The Archive never paid that well, really. Jonah hadn’t been keen on keeping his employees healthy in any sense: physically, mentally, or financially.

Martin needn’t have worried. The platform was nearly deserted and Jon felt no hunger at the moment. The Eye was quiet, satiated for now. That was how it went with live statements; they filled the emptiness so much better than those he read into the recorder himself. So much so that it might be easy to forget the cost.

“I’m sorry,” Jon said again at length, just to break the silence.

“I’m not the person you should be apologizing to.”

“I can’t very well chase him down now, can I?”

“So tell him in your dreams, or however it is you see him.” 

“I can’t. That isn’t how it works.”

Martin made no reply. He only stared at the screen that counted down the minutes until the train’s arrival. Jon studied the concrete underfoot. No matter what happened with Jonah, whether or not they stopped the world from ending, it wouldn’t change the central fact of Jon’s existence: he was a monster who fed on fear and served an evil god and there was nothing he could do about it. He’d failed to subsist on written statements alone and instead went around traumatizing people and dooming them to a life of nightmares just because the Eye desired it. Just because the Eye wanted that terror for its own. 

And he could tell himself that he hadn’t chosen it, but that wasn’t quite right, now was it? Maybe he hadn’t known what being the Archivist entailed when he took the job, but when he got blown up after the Unknowing, he could have chosen to die. Instead, he’d been afraid and he’d chosen to Become this. And now innocent people were suffering for his cowardice. 

The train pulled into the station with a roar. There were a few passengers on board the first carriage, but Martin steered them down the platform towards a deserted carriage near the back of the train. Jon followed automatically. They stowed their suitcases and sat down across from one another as the train pulled away. The station, the village, the safehouse, and the terrified driver faded away into the distance. 

An attendant came by to check their tickets. Then she was gone, and Martin and Jon were alone.

“What happened?” Martin finally asked him. 

“I… got hungry. I couldn’t stop it.”

“Jon, you… you know it can’t be like this.”

“I  _ know  _ I can’t, but I don’t know how to change it! Maybe if I were in the actual Archives it would be different, but I’m not, and sometimes it just grabs me and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to hurt people, but I don’t know what to do.” He trailed off. Words failed him, as words so often did. They were tricky things, words. They could betray you at any moment. He could almost picture the words of the statement Jonah had tried to make him read, shadowing his every step, waiting to take over his tongue and use it to break the world. Martin had burned one copy, but Jonah would send another, and another, until one found its way past his defenses and made him the instrument of its ritual. 

Martin was quiet for a long time. Then, “How hungry did you feel when we got in that car?”

“It was pretty bad, but I didn’t think he had a statement in him until he mentioned the cows. Sometimes that’s how it goes.”

“Took you by surprise?”

“You might say that.”

“You need to tell me when it gets like that.  _ Before  _ taking anyone’s statement, I mean,” Martin said. “I can’t help you if I don’t know.”

Jon buried his face in his hands. “It’s just… I’m ashamed. Of feeling that, and then doing it. And now I’ll get to see him again and every time it’ll be awful for the both of us.”

“Maybe once we get rid of Jonah, we can set you up in the Archives. Make sure you have enough paper statements to get by,” Martin said. 

“Maybe.” Jon wasn’t so sure that getting rid of Jonah would be easy. For one, both of them might die. And even in the best case scenario, there might not be anything left of Jonathan Sims in the end. Maybe there would only be the Archivist, gazing through a hundred thousand eyes, all-seeing and uncaring. If that’s what it took to beat Jonah and save the world, he’d do it. He’d let what was left of his humanity fade away. He desperately wanted to hope it wouldn’t come to that, but better complete his Becoming than let Martin be hurt.

Especially because he might not have any choice in the matter in the end.

They spoke of small things after that. Cows and cats and tea. Once, Martin started to tell a funny story about the early days working in the Archives, only to fall silent at the mention of Tim’s name. Too much sadness there, especially now, knowing that he had died to prevent an apocalypse that had always been doomed to fail. They steered the conversation to safer waters. Not their childhoods, obviously -- those weren’t safe waters for either of them, and would be topics for another time. Instead they talked of music and books and movies, just like a normal couple. Jon told Martin about the band he was in at university. Martin told Jon about the time when he was sixteen and visiting a lake with some cousins, and had helped them steal a boat for a joyride, and nearly ended up sinking it and had to be rescued by a crew of local fishermen. 

“You? Piracy on the high seas?” laughed Jon.

“You’re one to talk, Mr. I-was-in-a-bizarre-concept-band-in-uni.”

“I just can’t picture you as a juvenile delinquent.”

“Yeah, well, try harder.” Martin was grinning as he said it. Jon returned the smile. Sometimes, you had to laugh, he was learning. Even when the world was coming apart at the seams. 

As the sun faded behind the hills and the train sped south, Martin and Jon kept talking. It was an effort to fill the silence, certainly, and to avoid speaking about the sadness and fear that waited just beneath the surface. But it was also simply nice, grounding in a way, making Jon feel centered and connected to something that wasn’t the door at the back of his mind. 

He talked and he watched the Scottish countryside pass by, cows and all. It rained a bit and let up and then rained some more. Another staff member came by selling little packets of shortbread. Martin bought one and split it with Jon. It wasn’t particularly good shortbread, but that didn’t seem so important, right at that moment. 

It was full twilight when Martin saw the spider.

He was in the middle of explaining the plot of his favorite TV show -- something elaborate about spies -- when his eyes fixed on something near the ceiling. “Another spider,” he said softly. 

Jon turned. The spider had made its web right above the center aisle. He wasn’t close enough to make out anything more than its general shape, but he knew all the same that it was looking right back at him, unafraid. 

“I told you last time,” Jon said. “Leave us alone.” He readied himself to draw on the Eye.

The spider didn’t move. Its friends did, though. In a rush of mincing limbs and unblinking little eyes, they emerged from the overhead compartments, from the seats across the aisle, from the cracks around the windows. From every crack and nook and cranny they came, as though the train had been stuffed with them all along. They flooded the compartment within seconds. Apart from a circle of a few feet around Jon and Martin, practically every surface was covered with them. Thousands upon thousands of spiders, and every one daring Jon to chase them out. 

Jon swallowed hard. It was one thing to chase away a single spider. It was entirely another to take on what looked like the entire arachnid population of a sizable town. He felt the train slow. They were nearing a station. It wasn’t their destination, not by a long shot -- they were supposed to change a few stops from here, then catch the line that would take them the rest of the way to London -- but anything felt safer than remaining in this carriage at this moment.

“Jon? What do we do?”

“We’re getting out of here.” The spiders had considerately left space around their stowed luggage. They formed a path for Jon and Martin, down the center aisle and out the door. They didn’t follow them onto the platform. Jon watched as the train pulled away. The windows of the carriage where he and Martin had been sitting were completely black. 

“What was that?” asked Martin. “More of the Web?”

“I guess they didn’t appreciate me running them out of the cabin.”

“Suppose not. Do we wait for the next train and hope for fewer spiders?”

“Not much choice.” Jon glanced around the platform. He hadn’t even bothered to check where they were before he’d gotten them off the train. A large black sign proclaimed in white letters the name of the town: LEIGHTON. Next to it was the screen with the train schedule. No southbound trains due through the station until morning, and it was only half past seven. At least the rain had stopped.

“With the luck we’ve been having, there is a decent chance that the Web has set up a trap for us here,” said Jon. He asked the Eye for further information but got nothing. Useless. 

“It could have killed us on the train if it had wanted.”

“Maybe. It certainly seemed like it was trying to scare us.” Jon looked around the platform more carefully. It was empty but for them, lit only by thin fluorescent bulbs that did little to stave off the growing darkness. “We’ve got to get back on the train tomorrow, I think. Or at least, we’ve got to try.”

“Agreed.” 

A part of Jon thought it would be safest to just wait on the platform. There were a few benches set up along the walls. Jon could sit up, keep watch, and avoid his dreams while Martin slept. Then they could be on their way in the morning. Venturing into whatever town this was -- judging by the size and emptiness of the platform, it was likely a small one -- was only to risk running into trouble. If they stayed here, there would be the fewest possible barriers to their getting back on the train and on their way to London. 

Of course, staying on the platform would mean they would miss seeing Basira, and given that she was practically right here, they should definitely --

Wait.

“Basira!” Jon exclaimed, nearly intelligibly. 

“What?”

“She’s here!”

“What, here? Now?”

“Yes. She’s in the pub in town.” He Knew that she’d arrived in the pub an hour ago and ordered nothing, drawing an annoyed look from the bartender, which she’d ignored. 

He grabbed Martin’s hand without thinking. “We’ve got to talk to her.” He practically dragged Martin off the platform. 

“Jon, slow down. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Basira’s here. Something to do with Daisy, I think.”

“Isn’t Daisy, you know, a bit  _ feral  _ right now?”

_ Alice “Daisy” Tonner is lost in the Hunt.  _

“Yes.”

“And what are we going to do if we find her?”

“I don’t know, try to help her?”

“How, exactly?”

“I don’t know, but we’ve got to try!”  _ I saved her once. I can save her again.  _ He said it to himself like it was the voice of the Eye. Maybe if he tried to turn sheer desperation into Knowledge, he could make it true. 

“I’m with you, but please, let’s be careful,” Martin said as they left the station and went half-walking, half-jogging, dragging their suitcases, through the quiet streets of Leighton. It was hard to tell much about the town through the dusk, and Jon wasn’t in much of a mood for sightseeing, but his initial impression of it being a small town had been correct. He Knew the way to the Black Dog pub, but even if he hadn’t, he would have found it easily enough anyway. It was barely a minute’s walk from the station. It was a slightly shabby-looking old place from the outside, advertising chicken and chips and “Best selection of whiskey til Bramley,” whatever that meant. Jon led Martin through the door.

Inside, it was dimly lit and only slightly less sparsely populated than the street outside. A billiards table took up the center of the room and an old television sat across from the bar, playing a muted football match. And in a table near one of the few windows, scrolling through her phone, was Basira.

She looked up, startled, as Jon and Martin came through the door, and quickly stuffed her phone back into her pocket. “What are you two doing here?” she asked. “I thought you were up north.”

“Can’t talk here,” said Jon. He glanced meaningfully around the room. Basira took his point at once. 

“It’s not safe out there. We shouldn’t go too far.”

“I’ll find us somewhere close. Ready?”

“Sure.” She stood and pushed her chair back under the table. The surprise on her face had already faded, replaced by that focused expression that Jon knew so well. He’d missed her. There was something so comforting about Basira: her certainty, her toughness, her steadiness. She followed Jon and Martin out onto the rain-soaked pavement. 

Jon cast about for somewhere with fewer eyes on them. No doubt Jonah knew they’d left the cabin, maybe even that they’d met up with Basira, but there was a chance he didn’t yet know  _ why.  _ It wouldn’t be too hard for him to guess, of course, but no need to make things too easy for him. Jon would have given a lot for the book that had kept Leitner hidden in the tunnels all those years, but even as he thought of it, he Knew Jonah had destroyed it. 

On impulse, he turned onto a side-street, away from the main road through town. As she followed, Basira kept the same determined expression but said nothing. Martin was likewise quiet, but Jon noticed him looking about, watching behind them for followers. Thinking of Daisy, maybe, or of a possible trap by the Web. 

Jon didn’t want to leave the lights of town too far behind. Nowhere was safe, and it was a delicate balance to strike, getting away from Jonah’s gaze without straying too far into the night. Luckily, it was only a hundred yards or so from the pub that the buildings abruptly thinned out. Hopefully, they could make it back to town quickly if needed. As a precaution, though, he hung a sharp left into a nearby field. He and Martin left their suitcases by the gate before picking their way through the thick grass. By now, the last light from the sunset had faded, but the moon was bright enough to walk by. At the center of the field, far from any human lights or prying eyes, he stopped and turned back to Martin and Basira. Both were watching him expectantly. 

“It’s good to see you, Basira,” he began. Odd thing to say after dragging her out of a pub and into an empty sheep pasture, but he had to start somewhere. 

“Yeah. What’s going on?” She leveled that gaze at him and crossed her arms. “I thought you two were supposed to be hiding out. Then I got a weird message from Martin this morning. What are you doing here and how did you find me?”

Questions pressed at Jon’s tongue. He shoved them back for the moment. “Jonah, he…”

Martin came to the rescue as always. “He sent us a fake statement in a package we thought was from you.” He told the story quickly, from how he’d inadvertently stopped Jon from bringing about the apocalypse to the Web chasing them off the train. Jon watched Basira carefully as Martin spoke, but she had a phenomenal poker face. 

“And you found me how, exactly?” she asked when Martin finished.

“I sort of  _ Knew  _ you were here,” Jon said.

“That’s not creepy at all.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t really control it, but under the circumstances, I think it was for the best.”

“So you’re trying to kill Elias, or Jonah or whatever his real name is, and you don’t have a plan.”

“That’s about it, yes.”

“But you’re going to London now anyway because you don’t want to give him time to come up with Plan B.”

“Pretty much.”

Basira took a deep breath. “Okay. What do you want from me?”

“It’d be helpful to know what you’re doing here, for a start.” Jon phrased it carefully to avoid accidentally compelling her. 

“Looking for what’s left of Daisy, basically. For a while I didn’t have any leads. She could have been anywhere. But I called in a few favors with the police and an old friend called me a couple days ago, said they’d gotten a trace on her phone. The signal was corrupted somehow, but they’d tracked it to a tower somewhere around here. Just one signal, but it was more than I’d gotten in the past couple weeks, so I came. You couldn’t just Know that?”

“Like it said, it doesn’t quite work like that.”

“Well, help me look for Daisy, then, since you’ve already dragged me out of a relatively safe, populated pub.”

Martin cut in. “Speaking of plans, what are we going to do when we find her? I mean, from what you’re saying, she’s not exactly in the best state of mind right now.”

Jon almost laughed at that. Trust Martin to find the most delicate way of saying that Daisy was currently a feral and bloodthirsty avatar of the Hunt, unlikely to be reasoned with and nigh invulnerable. 

Basira shrugged. “I never got much firearms training and from what I’ve heard, it wouldn’t do much good anyhow. My plan was to try to get her trapped somehow. There’s a construction site on the other side of town. They left out a cement truck.”

“Oh my god, you’re going to pull an Adelard Dekker on her!” Martin cried.

“A what?”

“You’re going to just  _ entomb _ her like that? She’s  _ Daisy _ \--”

“No, it’s not.  _ Daisy  _ asked me to do this. That thing that’s out there? That’s not her.  _ That’s the thing that killed her.  _ It’s what happens when one of those things gets inside you. They change you and in the end, there’s nothing left of the person you used to be.” She didn’t look at Jon as she spoke, but she might as well have. He had no response; after all, she wasn’t wrong.

“Not always!” Martin shot back. He looked as though he was about to say more, but he never got the chance. From the far end of the pasture came an awful noise, a twisted, snarling, howling sound. Jon spun around. Idiotically, he didn’t even have a torch, but almost at once he saw he didn’t need one. The thin moonlight reflected off a pair of eyes. A tall figure loomed near the fence. 

Daisy had found them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I felt bad about leaving things hanging like that when I had chapter 4 written already, so posting this a bit earlier than I intended :)

“You got any spooky powers that might be useful right now?” demanded Basira. 

“I…” He’d killed Peter Lukas, but he wasn’t sure quite  _ how,  _ or whether the same thing could work here and now _. _ More than that, he didn’t want to kill Daisy. He wanted to save her.

She stood still in the darkness, a predatory tension in her stance. Even in silhouette, there was something too sharp about her. Jon’s heart pounded and he could feel the fear of the Hunt setting in: the terror of the hare before the hounds, the mouse under the gaze of the hawk. Some detached part of him thought that maybe the Hunt and the Eye weren’t so very far apart. No wonder the great powers couldn’t be truly separated from one another. 

“Get ready to run,” said Basira. “On my word, we head for the construction site.”

“You two go,” Jon said. “I might be able to hold her off. Buy you some time.” Maybe he could compel her, slow her down if nothing else. 

“I’m not leaving you,” hissed Martin.

Before Jon could make any reply, Daisy moved. She stalked towards them with languid grace as though she had all the time in the world. The moonlight flashed off her bared teeth.

“Run!” yelled Basira. Martin grabbed Jon’s hand and pulled, and for a moment he resisted. Then a low, predatory sound rippled across the field, a sound of menace and a hunter’s feral joy, and he broke. He’d never been a brave man; he’d admitted as much to himself a dozen times over the past few years. He turned and followed Martin and Basira and he ran. 

It's not about the kill with the Hunt. It’s all about the chase.The ancient rhythm of predator and prey, the choking desperation of the hunted. Smaller shadows fleeing before the carnivorous thing that follows almost patiently. The hot breath of the hunter on the back of his neck, scrambling over the stone fence with scraped palms and bruised shins. Longing to look back and not daring to, knowing that the pursuer is coming, inexorable, relishing the scent of fear in the air. Stumbling into the road and sprinting blindly towards town, towards the lights, towards any hint of hope. Breath coming in ragged gasps. Martin’s hand clutched tightly in his own. 

Basira led them back to the main road. It wasn’t far, no more than a quick sprint, but the trip now seemed both accelerated -- they were running desperately -- and painfully drawn out. Every second, every breath, felt like an eternity. Once, Jon glanced behind him and saw the shadowy shape still on their trail. He turned and focused on the road ahead.

He’d hoped, and it had been an idiotic hope, that once they reached the main street of Leighton, that Daisy would let them go. But as they neared the pub, Jon saw the streetlamps dim and the curtains drawn over the pub’s windows. The street was utterly deserted. The people of Leighton, what few there were, had evidently gone to ground. They would not interrupt the hunt.

Basira ignored the shut-down pub and ran on with them towards the railway station. Just past it stood a fenced-off lot with a telltale truck parked just outside. They’d reached the construction site. Basira headed straight for the gate in the fence and shoved it open. The contractors had evidently left it unlocked, not expecting anyone in this small village to break in. Jon turned back once more to see Daisy making her unhurried way up the street. Her eyes flashed in the dim orange light from the streetlamps. 

There was nowhere else to run. Basira raced through the gate, presumably going to set up her trap. “What are we doing now?” asked Martin. 

Now was his only chance if he wanted to save Daisy. If he failed, maybe she’d rip them all apart, or maybe Basira would succeed in trapping her in the construction site. Either way, it would be too late for all of them. Through the fear that hung in the air, Jon faced the hunter. It’d have to be compulsion, then. It had been one thing facing down Peter Lukas this way. He’d been a whispery, beaten thing by then. Dangerous, certainly, but susceptible to the searching gaze of Beholding, the gaze that wouldn’t let him lapse back into Lonely unbeing. Now, though, tangling with an avatar of the Hunt with only a flimsy shield of questions, felt like absolute idiocy. The Eye was never one for destructive force. Its role was to record, not to fight, and on top of that, the Hunt had much less difficulty with being Watched than the Lonely. But all Jon’s choices had led to this moment, the last chance he had to save her. He had to take it. 

“Daisy,” he said,  _ “what do you see?” _ From somewhere came the soft click of a tape recorder turning itself on.

She stopped, shook her head as though trying to fight off a cloud of flies. 

_ “Tell me what you see,” _ he repeated. His voice echoed and crackled through the night. Daisy took a shuddering step forward into the glare of a streetlight. She looked sharp and gaunt and hungry. Her face contorted into a snarl of rage. 

“Not…” she spat. “I’m not…” She, the Hunt, was fighting him hard and still moving forward. 

Jon opened the door behind his eyes. 

For a moment he was nearly lost in a rush of impressions, visions, bits and pieces of information devoid of context or meaning. The world swam around him. Once, he’d been unprepared for this and had been utterly overwhelmed. Now, though, he managed the mental equivalent of hanging on by his fingernails. Through the onslaught of raw Knowledge, he wrapped his will around the Ceaseless Watcher and focused its Eye.

_ “Tell me!” _ It wasn’t just him saying it this time. It was the thing that looked into and through him, the thing that entered the world through his being, and now he turned its scrutiny on Daisy. It caught her and froze her in place. It pierced her, needle-sharp, and in that moment it felt to Jon that the moon and sky and all the stars were no more than just so many eyes, and he was looking through every last one, and all of them were trained on her. His gaze seared through her. There was nothing he could not See. He Saw the Hunt as strong as ever, but that wasn’t all. There was more than the Hunt to See in Daisy, even now, especially now.

She gave a whimpering little howl. Then, “I see…”

_ “Tell me, Daisy Tonner.” _

“Basira!” She spoke the name as though it had been torn out of her, but still she spoke. Jon didn’t have to turn his head or look round. He could See Basira had left the construction site and was now standing beside him, staring at Daisy. She was marked for Beholding, one of Eye’s own, and so of course she had come to watch. 

“I… I see Basira,” Daisy said, like a dam breaking. Her voice was strained and thin and still had the ghost of a growl to it, but she gained momentum as she spoke. “It’s Basira. I asked her to come and find me and she did.”

Jon Saw that Basira had started to cry. Basira herself didn’t seem to notice. 

_ “Do you want to hurt Basira?”  _

“No. Never.”

Jon Knew he couldn’t keep up the questions for too long, not without hurting Daisy. When he let the compulsion go, she would be free. He’d found her beneath the Hunt’s influence, but there was no telling what would happen when he closed the Eye. So, while the door in his mind was still open, he asked one more question.

_ “What will you do when I let you go?” _

“I don’t know!” she cried in anguish.

A headache built behind Jon’s eyes from the strain of focusing the Eye. He felt his concentration start to slip. He reached out a hand and Martin found it. 

Beside him, Basira took a step forward. “Daisy,” was all she said. And in the space of a breath, Jon lost his grip on the Eye. The world narrowed, the tide of Knowledge flowed out as rapidly as it had come. He nearly lost his balance from the shock of it, of just being  _ Jon  _ again, or as close to that as he ever came these days. Martin caught his arm and kept him from sprawling to the pavement. 

Basira stood in front of Daisy in the darkened street. Neither moved. The predatory tension still radiated from Daisy as she locked eyes with Basira. Jon held his breath. He didn’t think he had another such compulsion in him. If the Hunt was going to strike, he could do little to stop it. And Basira was now directly in harm’s way. It was all up to Daisy.

The silence and stillness stretched on as the seconds ticked by slowly. Then at last, Daisy moved. She shifted her weight uncertainly. Then she took a step back, out of the light of the streetlamp. Finally, she spun on her heels and raced off into the night. Basira jumped a little and held out a hand as though she wanted to follow, but Daisy moved with Hunt-given speed and almost instantly, she was gone. 

Basira exhaled audibly. When she turned back to Jon and Martin, she was no longer crying, though tear tracks still showed on her cheeks. 

“There’s something left of her,” she said. When she spoke, she sounded like she’d seen her first ray of sunlight after years in the dark. “She’s not dead.”

“She’s still in there,” Jon told her. “At the end there, she could have killed us if she’d wanted. I couldn’t have stopped it. But she didn’t.” Despite yet another close brush with death, despite seeing what had become of Daisy, he wanted to smile. More than smile; he practically wanted to shout with joy, which, for Jon, was an exceptionally rare feeling. Daisy could come back. There was still hope. 

“I’m going after her,” Basira told them. “She needs me.”

“Of course she does,” Martin said. 

“Will you two be all right on your own?” 

“Probably not,” Jon replied, “but we’re going anyway.” He gave Martin’s hand a squeeze.

“Be careful,” said Basira. “You have my number if you need anything. I’ll help you if I can, but Daisy…”

“Of course,” said Martin. 

Basira collected her belongings from the tiny B&B she’d booked and Martin and Jon retrieved their suitcases from the field where Daisy had found them. Sneaking back onto the platform was a simple matter: Jon picked a moment when he Knew the cameras were focused away from the turnstiles and they slipped back in the way they’d come. There was a CCTV blindspot on the platform, conveniently including a bench, and he and Martin sat down to await the morning southbound train. 

Jon was worn out and his headache had only partly faded, but he didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want any dreams of trapped statement-givers reliving their trauma for the Eye’s benefit. So he sat up as Martin leaned against his shoulder. Martin was much bigger than Jon, but Jon still loved having him pressed close, feeling the comfort of his weight, listening to his steady breathing. He himself drifted a little, half-dozing, and lost track of time. 

The sound of the approaching train brought him back. He gently woke Martin and, as the sun rose over the hills, they stepped on the train to London together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is that a glimmer of hope I see?


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back, sorry for the later update than usual!
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: the re-appearance of body horror/cruelty to animals, similarly to chapter 2.

They bought tea, a couple of apples, and some biscuits from the onboard concessions. After a quick discussion, they picked a carriage that had a few other occupants, all of whom looked more or less human. Not that outward appearance counted for much. Jon wished at times like these that he had more control over the Knowledge he received from the Eye, but that, of course, would have made his life too easy. 

He and Martin sat down next to one another this time. After they’d eaten what passed for breakfast, Martin said, “It was brave, what you did.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Jon. “I didn’t have any other choices at that point and so I did the only thing I could think of.”

“I still think it’s brave.”

“What Basira did, going up to Daisy like that,  _ that _ was brave.”

“I can’t believe she said she was going to bury her in concrete!”

“She thought she’d be honoring Daisy’s wishes. That the Daisy we knew was essentially dead.”

“Yeah, and it was lucky we came along, wasn’t it?” Almost as soon as he spoke, though, Martin caught Jon’s eye and looked down. The same thought had obviously occurred to both of them.

“I’m not sure I believe in luck anymore,” Jon said.

“Especially not when we were chased off a train by a bunch of spiders. That’s just  _ slightly _ suspicious.”

“God, I hate the Web.”

“I know.” Martin squeezed his shoulder. Jon exhaled slowly. He was tired still, though the headache was slowly subsiding. Channeling the Ceaseless Watcher had been more taxing than he’d realized at the time. He did his best to let his worries fade into the background. They never went away, not entirely, but he could sometimes ignore them for a little while. Especially if he leaned against Martin’s shoulder.

He could hear Martin’s heartbeat from this position. Steady and comforting, an oddly brave sound in a way -- still ticking after everything that could have killed him over the past few years. Defying death and horror. 

There was a question he should ask. He wasn’t good with people; Martin put up with him somehow, but he felt awkward and unpracticed at real intimacy. Still, he ought to have learned his lesson a thousand times over by now. Isolation was not the answer, and here was Martin, solid and warm, and Jon almost felt close to safe, which was a not-so-minor miracle these days, and he needed to know. 

“Martin?”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind if I… if I asked… how you’re doing through all of this?” 

“Hmm.” Martin paused for a moment. “Good question. I’m scared of course, all the time, but after the couple of years we’ve had, that’s not exactly headline news. I’m scared for Daisy and Basira. I’m scared for you, too.”

“I frighten you?” 

“I said I’m scared  _ for  _ you, not scared  _ of  _ you.”

“Oh.”

“But you know what else? I’m actually really quite, well, pissed off.”

“You are?”

“Yes. It’s like, one moment I’ll be thinking of everything we’re up against, and then I remember that it really just comes down to a greedy, vicious little man. On some level it’s just, ‘how dare he?’ And for the stupidest, emptiest motives imaginable. He’s such a  _ cliche.” _

That startled a laugh out of Jon. He got a mental picture of Jonah as a mustache-twirling Disney villain, perched in his tower and waiting for the heroes to come to topple his reign. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Jonah was no fairy-tale sorcerer and Jon, at least, was about as far as one could get from a pure-hearted storybook prince. 

“So I just concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. That’s all we can do, for now.”

In response, Jon pulled Martin closer. 

Jonah was almost certainly watching them intently, Jon reasoned. He tried, as before, to Know for sure, but it seemed the Eye wasn’t interested in divulging the secrets of its other servant. Still, it was only rational to assume that Jonah had constant eyes on them and by now had realized that his first attempt to perform the ritual had failed. He’d figure out some way to try again.

That familiar paranoia started to rise in him. He deliberately tried to avoid reading even the headlines of the newspaper that another passenger held, in case Jonah had somehow hacked into the printing presses and written his statement into the day’s  _ Times.  _ He tried not to look at the billboards they passed. When they stopped in towns and cities on the long trip south, he kept his eyes on the floor. 

But there’s an old saying: it isn’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you. And, for various values of “they,” someone had been out to get him for a long time now. 

Martin dug out an old pair of headphones and listened to some of the tapes that had been included with Jonah’s statement. The first one he’d listened to made him gasp a little, and when Jon tried to ask him what was wrong, he only said, “It’s your birthday party that we had, back… back before it all really got started.”

“Oh.” Jon remembered that party. Remembered Tim’s wry smile, in the days before his world had fallen apart. Sasha, the real one -- for all he was an avatar of Beholding, he still couldn’t picture her face. Jon had been his usual pricky, asshole self that day. Elias, Jonah, had come down to gloat. No doubt sending this particular tape was meant for the same purpose. 

“Do you want to hear it? I don’t think it’s anything  _ dangerous,  _ but, well… It’s kind of hard to listen to with everything that’s happened.”

“I’ll save it for later,” Jon replied. 

“Fair enough.” Martin put the headphones away. “I think that’s enough for me for one day.”

Shortly after midday, the train pulled into King’s Cross station. On the infinitesimal chance that Jonah hadn’t seen them before, he had to be watching now. Jon could practically feel the weight of all the CCTV cameras, tourists taking selfies -- even the printed eyes of the models in advertisements along the walls. He kept his head down still, not wanting to accidentally read anything, trusting Martin to guide him. 

They’d talked briefly of a plan on the journey. It boiled down to getting to the Panopticon and getting rid of Jonah as quickly as possible. But before they could do that, they needed more information. And they had to get into the tunnels eventually. There was only one entrance Jon could be sure of. So, as usual, all paths led to the Archives. 

Jon knew Jonah would have done his best to destroy anything in the Archives that could be used against him. He’d done quite a good job of it before, having neatly stripped the place of anything that Jon could have used to learn too much too quickly. Still, Jon figured that Jonah couldn’t have actually destroyed any useful tapes or transcripts. He belonged too deeply to Beholding to be able to erase knowledge like that. As for  _ finding _ the tapes, well, Jon now knew what he was looking for, and maybe that would be enough. Besides, he had a strange conviction, not quite Knowledge but not far off, that the Archives and their secrets belonged to  _ him,  _ not Jonah. From what Martin had told him back at the cabin, Jonah had called him the Archive. Time to find out exactly what that meant. 

It wasn’t a plan. But it was a starting place. He followed Martin towards the Tube station. The more time Jonah had to plan since seeing them coming, the greater the chance he’d manage to destroy or hide the evidence they needed, so they were going to charge right in. They’d come to the decision in whispered and deliberately cryptic conversations. Jon half-worried that they’d managed to miscommunicate horribly and they’d end up on the other side of town. He couldn’t even have stopped it, so carefully was he studying the grimy floor of the Tube station and later, the train itself. But soon enough, he could tell by the automated announcements that they were closing in on South Kensington Station, on Chelsea, and on the Magnus Institute. 

Martin led Jon up the steps and out of the station. It was only a few short blocks between him and the Institute. From what Basira had said, there would likely be police near the building. Security cameras too. Jon kept his face down. Though he didn’t dare look up to see them, he could feel the thousands of eyes in the street. Their scrutiny seemed to intensify with every step he took. He was all too aware that his scars were distinctive. If anyone was looking for him, he’d be easy enough to identify. 

At last, they reached a familiar corner. Across the street from the Institute entrance. Jon didn’t look up.

“Okay,” Martin said. “There’s one policewoman outside. She looks a bit distracted, though. I think if we’re quick and act like we belong here...”

“Lead on,” said Jon.

With one hand on Jon’s shoulder, Martin steered him across the street. He tried to project purpose and confidence as he walked, a difficult trick when he was still keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the pavement. Any second, he half-expected to hear a shout from the policewoman near the door. But nothing happened. Martin held the door for him and he stepped across the threshold and into the Institute. 

Jon could feel it as it happened. Had it always been like this, and he’d just been so used to it that he hadn’t noticed? Whatever the truth, the feeling of being  _ watched _ increased sharply as he entered the building. This was the Eye’s domain. Nothing went unnoticed here. 

“Martin? What are you -- Jon?” Rosie’s voice sounded from the reception desk off to one side.

“Hi, Rosie,” said Martin in a hurried whisper. “Listen, I know this is weird, but we need to get to the Archives right away, and I promise we’re not doing anything --”

“It’s all right, Martin,” Rosie interjected. “You just surprised me, is all. Things have been, well… Are you here to, you know? Fix things?”

“We hope so,” said Martin. “If you could just let us through…”

“Of course.” 

“Thank you.” And then Martin drew Jon away, past the reception desk and towards the stairs leading down to the basement, to the Archives. He managed a soft “Thank you” to Rosie as they passed. He still didn’t dare to look up.

As they descended the stairs, the familiar Archive smell rose up from below: old paper, dust, a soft musty basement-scent. At the bottom of the steps they turned into a narrow hallway, and Jon found himself standing outside his own office door.

Martin reached out a hand to open it for him, but Jon stopped him with a soft word. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing or why, only that it felt right for him to reach into his pocket and sort through the keys, fit the right one into the lock, grip the knob and turn, and then he was back in his office at last. Small, cramped, covered in stacks of statements, tapes, filing cabinets, books, his special drawer where he kept his mugs for tea. He didn’t need to turn on the light. 

The feeling of being watched was still there, but it felt almost comfortable here, somehow. This was his place. He might be observed here, but he was, ultimately, safe in the Archives, or at least, as safe as he could ever be anywhere. Case in point: he didn’t need to look at his desk to know exactly which statement Jonah had left lying there, front and center, where he couldn’t have helped but see and read it. He stared at the ceiling while pointing to the desk. 

“Martin, there’s another copy of that statement there.”

Martin hurried to pick it up. Jon forced himself to dig through his coat pocket and pass him the spiderweb lighter. He watched the smoke alarm, hoping it wouldn’t go off. It didn’t, even as Martin burned the statement. 

The Archives were  _ his.  _ Jonah couldn’t fool him here, not now, not now that he knew how deeply he was tied to this place, and this place to him. Honestly, it was a weak, desperate attempt on Jonah’s part. 

Jon drew in a deep breath. He asked Beholding for assistance, and here, in his Archives, Beholding answered. It was a vague answer, more so than usual. There was a kind of reluctance to it, as if the Eye didn’t want to give up this particular bit of information. 

“All right,” he said. “Jonah took most of the useful statements up to his office after Gertrude’s death. But not quite all of them. He could see most things, but he wasn’t the Archivist, and Gertrude got awfully good at hiding things from him. So he overlooked a few.”

They spread out. Jon gave Martin direction and together, they worked their way through old disorganized boxes and stacks of files. They never did manage to entirely organize this place. It didn’t help that Jon lacked the simple, automatic Knowledge of which statement to choose. When he glanced at his watch, he was shocked to discover that several hours had passed and it was now dark outside. 

The exhaustion caught up with him all at once. He hadn’t slept in several days, and although he needed much less sleep than he once had, everything he’d been through since receiving Jonah’s statement had taken its toll. His vision blurred around the edges. 

He forced himself to finish sorting through the stack of statement’s he’d started on. No time to rest. Jonah could be planning anything,  _ anything,  _ and every single delay only put the world in more danger. He reached for the next stack of files. 

“Hey.” He turned to see Martin standing over him.

“Are you okay,”

“I’m fine, Martin,” Jon said, convincingly.

“No, you’re not. You look awful.”

“I’ve got to finish this.”

“No, you don’t. You’ve got to get some sleep.”

“We don’t have time --”

“You’re not in any fit state to take on Jonah right now. I’ll keep watch. Come on, let’s get you some sleep.”

Over Jon’s increasingly sleepy protests, Martin got him settled on the break room couch. He fetched an old blanket from when he’d been living here, during the Jane Prentiss days. Jon barely had time to pull the blanket over him before another wave of exhaustion dragged him under.

_ The Archivist stood in the center of a field. The sky was dark, and he could see snowflakes falling in the beam of torch-lights. He didn’t feel the cold, though. He never did, in these dreams.  _

_ He watched through a thousand eyes as a cluster of people came charging through the thin crust of snow. He saw what they saw, a thin and warped thing, caught in the torchlight, hunched over a fallen cow. He saw the bone -- a tibia, Beholding told him --- break the skin like the surface of a pond, leaving no hole, no wound, no trace of its passage behind.  _

_ The onlookers fled. The torch-beams cut wildly through the darkness as they ran. Graham Tremont’s eyes were wide and terrified and they saw the Archivist there, unmoving, expressionless, watching and watching and watching.  _

_ And again. _

_ And again. _

_ And again. _

_ He moved through dozens of nightmares. Statement-givers reliving their terror, and him drinking it in, all his eyes open. They recognized him. Some looked at him with resignation, some with horror, and some with anger, but none could break the pattern, could escape the searching of the Eye. Not even the Archivist. _

_ And again. _

_ And again. _

_ And again -- _

Jon woke at last with a gasp. For a moment he felt completely disorientated, not sure whether he was supposed to be in a small village in Scotland or a frozen field or a tunnel beneath the earth. But then he saw the crack of light under the closed door, and his eyes adjusted. The break room in the Archives. No one had arrested or attacked him during the night. 

He stood, shrugged the blanket off. Opened the door and stepped into the corridor, blinking in the sudden light. Martin was in his office, going through statements. The clock on the wall read 6:27.

“Good morning,” said Jon.

Martin gave him a smile. “Feeling better?”

“Sort of.” Jon sighed, tried to shake off the nightmares. This was why he didn’t like to sleep. Still, he did feel rested. “Did you get any sleep?”

“A bit,” Martin told him. “I wanted to keep an eye out in case anyone came looking for us. No one did.”

“This is the Archives,” said Jon. “I think it’s as safe as any place we could be right now.”

“I was just about to make some tea. Would you like some?”

“Of course.”

As Martin returned to the break room for tea, Jon turned his attention to the pile of statements Martin had been looking through. The last one in the pile -- his hand recoiled from it, unthinking. Jon thought of the last time something like this had happened, and he gritted his teeth and picked the statement up. He dropped it three times before he finally managed to get it free from the pile. A tape recorder sat to one side of his desk. He was fairly certain it hadn’t been there a moment ago. 

He was just readying himself to open the file and start reading when --

\-- Georgie and Melanie --

\-- tunnels --

\-- NotThem --

He leapt up as though he’d been burned, badly starling Martin, who’d just come back through the door with two mugs of tea. The tea splashed across the floor.

“Oh my god, what’s wrong?” Martin asked.

“Not-Sasha escaped from the tunnels and came looking for me,” Jon told him. “It couldn’t find me. So instead, it’s gone after Georgie and Melanie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments give me LIFE thank you all so much <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! It's been a rough few weeks but I am back with more shenanigans! And the Admiral makes an appearance (don't worry folks, he's gonna be fine)!
> 
> cw for voyeurism (nothing super-explicit, just some watching of people who are not aware/consenting to be watched, pretty typical Eye stuff)

“Jon, this is probably a trap.”

“In all likelihood, yes.”

“Jonah probably sent it after them.”

“Almost certainly.”

“And we’re just charging in blind -- as usual?”

“We can’t just sit here and wait for Melanie and Georgie to be killed or, or  _ replaced  _ by that thing!”

“Of course not, but do you actually know what you’re going to  _ do _ if it finds you?”

Jon grabbed his too-big coat. “Maybe the same thing I did with Daisy. Or whatever it was I did with Peter Lukas. But I can’t let Georgie and Melanie fall victim to it, not if I could have stopped it.”

Martin sighed. He straightened his shoulders. Then, “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Are you sure you want to come? You’d be safe here. Well,  _ safer _ anyway.”

“Nope. I’m coming with you.” And Jon, despite the fear that clenched his stomach, was deeply, ridiculously grateful. He hated a lot of the things he’d met over the years -- Annabelle Cane, Jude Perry, Jonah -- but Not-Sasha sparked in him a twisting, vicious rage of unique intensity. She’d stolen Sasha’s face and life and tried to use what she’d taken to kill them all. The Stranger had to be among his least favorite of the entities, and that was saying something, it being such a competitive category. 

Jon felt the focus of the Eye shift as he left the safety of the Archives. Without the protection of his statements and tapes and familiar basement walls, he dropped his head again and shadowed Martin out the door. Rosie was away from her desk, out at lunch; there was no one to see them go. He hoped she would be okay. She’d survived an awful lot of strange goings-on. Hopefully she’d get through this one, too. 

Jon kept his head down and followed Martin to the Tube station entrance. He tried to bundle his coat up around his face and was fairly certain he only succeeded in looking even more suspicious to anyone who might be watching. Still, no one stopped them as they descended the escalator and caught the train bound for Georgie’s flat. 

They didn’t talk much on the way over. Jon was caught up in trying to Know what was going on, to at least have a little background before rushing in. Georgie and Melanie were at home. They were still asleep, Georgie in Melanie’s arms. 

Jon frowned. He was trying to avoid intimate details -- terribly uncomfortable and definitely none of his business -- but some of them slipped through anyway. He tried to justify it to himself, invading their privacy in the cause of saving their lives. It still made him squirm internally, but he pushed on regardless. They could yell at him later when they hopefully weren’t dead.

It was hard to get a sense of Not-Sasha. He Knew it was close, homing in on the apartment, but that it hadn’t arrived yet. He couldn’t tell for certain how it had learned of Georgie and Melanie, but figured he could guess anyway -- Martin was almost certainly right and this was a trap set by Jonah. Well, he was going to walk right in and try to save the people he cared about. He might be a monster, but he didn’t want to be  _ that _ kind of monster. Not while he still had anything resembling a choice, anyway.

“Hey, you ready?” asked Martin as the train clattered to a stop at the station nearest Georgie’s apartment.

“Close enough,” Jon told him. “You?”

“Ready as I’m going to be, I guess.”

Martin led him out of the station and up into the morning rush-hour crowds. It was a short walk, less than ten minutes -- away from the busy thoroughfare where the Tube station was and down a series of side streets. Jon gave Martin quiet directions, judging half by the familiar curbs and street corners, and half by Beholding speaking softly in his thoughts. They were both on-edge, aware Not-Sasha was near, perhaps lying in wait somewhere to spring an ambush. Under a clear morning sky and not, say, down in the tunnels or the shadowy backrooms of Artefact Storage, it was a little harder to imagine a lurking life-stealing Stranger creature around every corner. But only a  _ little _ harder. There were plenty of things willing to come at you in broad daylight. 

Nothing did, though, and they turned the final corner onto Georgie’s street. It was a quiet little residential street. Blocks of flats with lots of students. Coffee shop at one end, takeaway at the other. When he’d lived here, Jon thought he would almost have liked it, if he hadn’t been spending most of his time panicking about Leitner and the police and his own newfound involvement with the Eye. 

“Should we just ring the bell?” asked Martin. When Jon nodded, he pressed the button for Melanie’s apartment. A generic buzzer sounded, and then Georgie’s voice came crackling out of the tinny little speaker: “Who’s there?”

“It’s um, Martin and Jon. Can we come in? It’s urgent,” said Martin.

No reply from the speaker. As the seconds ticked by, Jon became increasingly convinced that Georgie and Melanie would turn them away. Both of them had every reason to do so; Melanie had actually  _ quit the institute  _ with all that entailed. Martin and Jon turning up unannounced on “urgent” business? Definitely not what she’d had in mind when she blinded herself.

Jon was just about to suggest to Martin that they go, set up watch on the street for any signs of Not-Sasha, when the buzzer suddenly rang again. Martin pushed open the door and they crossed the small lobby towards the staircase.

Georgie was already standing in the doorway of the third-floor flat by the time they arrived. She had her arms crossed and a decidedly unwelcoming expression, Jon noted, as he dared to look up from the carpet. 

“Hi,” said Martin. 

“Hi,” said Georgie, much less warmly. 

“You’re in danger,” Jon blurted out. 

Georgie raised an eyebrow. “You mean, in addition to the amount of danger I presume we’re in just from having the two of you turn up?”

“Well… yes.”

“This had better be important, Jon. Melanie needs space. We asked you not to suck us back into all this…”

“I know…”

“...So I’m going to assume you have a good reason. Well?”

“You’re being stalked by something. By, by Not-Sasha. It’s on its way here. We think Jonah -- I mean, we think Elias sent it.” No reason Melanie would know that Jonah Magnus and Elias Bouchard were one and the same.

“What did you say?”

Melanie had appeared in the doorway to the flat. She was still wearing pyjama bottoms. A pair of sunglasses neatly covered what remained of her eyes, but Jon Knew what was behind them anyway, and not for the first time, he roundly condemned himself for letting her get trapped to the point where she’d had to take this way out. One more horror for him to answer for. 

“Not-Sasha,” he repeated. “It’s coming. I don’t know when, exactly, but soon, and I think Elias sent it after you.”

“And you know this… how?”

“The, erm, Eye told me.”

“Why would the Eye tell you this?” Melanie asked sharply. “Why wouldn’t it want to go along with Elias’ plan, if what you’re saying is true?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I was in the Archive at the time and I seem to have a bit more control there? But the Eye itself, it hasn’t ever lied to me. I don’t think it can.”

“It’s  _ evil,  _ Jon, and that should be enough.”

“Yes, you’re right. You’re right. Still, I’m pretty sure there’s a monster headed here right now, and it’s going to try to kill you, so please, can you let us in? I can try to protect you.”

“This is clearly a trap,” said Georgie. “Something happens at the Institute, the both of you skip town, then you turn up saying that the Eye told you Elias is planning to kill us? It makes no sense. We’re done with the Eye.” She glanced back at Melanie, then looked pointedly to Jon. Reminding him of just exactly how  _ done  _ with the Eye they were.

“Okay, maybe some… explanation would help?” Martin cut in. “This makes more sense with context. A lot’s happened in the past couple days.”

“We don’t have much time,” Jon said. “Please. Let us in so we can talk.”

Georgie frowned at him. “Stay there. No spying.” She turned, and with Melanie, walked back into the flat and shut the door. 

Jon studiously tried not to Know what they were saying on the other side. There was a trick to it, like not thinking about elephants, and some content still bled through -- Georgie telling Melanie that this was her decision, her being the one who’d been hurt the most by the Institute. 

“It’s my fault,” he whispered to Martin.

“It was her choice in the end.”

“She should never have had to make it.”

Martin paused. Then, “No, she shouldn’t have. Knowing what you do now, you’d have done things differently. We all would have. We’ve all got to figure out how to live with that. But listen --”

Whatever Martin had been about to say was cut off by the flat door re-opening. Georgie stood in the entrance, arms still crossed and expression still wary. “Melanie says you can come in,” she told them.

Jon allowed his gaze to lift as he entered the flat. He knew Melanie and Georgie didn’t let any open eyes or rogue statements through the front door. The entrance led into the small living room with a window overlooking the street where Jon had once recorded statements after Leitner’s death. Melanie was sat on the sofa opposite the window.

Something furry and familiar twined itself through Jon’s legs. He bent, almost reflexively, to scratch the Admiral behind the ears. 

“Let’s get to the point, shall we?” said Georgie loudly. “What’s this explanation that’s supposed to make all this make sense?”

Jon sighed and started in. He began with a rough summary of the events at the Panopticon, including Elias’ true identity and Peter Lukas’ real plan. He briefly described going into the Lonely after Martin and their subsequent flight to Scotland. Then, he ran down the events since they’d gotten Jonah’s statement and figured out his plan. By the time he finished, Georgie’s expression had shifted from suspicious to horrified. Melanie still sat unmoving on the sofa, still and quiet. 

It was only the calm before the storm. “He wanted to use you to  _ end the world?” _ Melanie spat. 

“Essentially.”

“So what, he’s thinking he can go after us to draw you out? This  _ is _ a trap, then?”

“...Yes.” There wasn’t much else to say. 

“And you came here anyway?”

“The NotThem, it doesn’t care what Jonah wants, not really. It’d be just as happy to kill you, just because it could, if I didn’t come. And I figured, well, I might be able to help.”

“How?”

Here is a truth about the Stranger: it lives for drama. It’s perhaps the most theatrical entity, both in the literal and metaphoric sense. Clowns and automata, face paint, sculptors in wood and skin and metal: these things are its tools, same as costumes and stage makeup for a performer, and it takes delight in its pageantry. All its masks and faces and impersonations, all line up for the grand show. Its ritual is a  _ dance,  _ for god’s sake. 

And so, naturally, its creatures have the timing of seasoned actors. Not-Sasha chose that moment, in the ringing silence after Melanie’s question, to knock on the door.

“Hello! Thought I’d drop by for a quick chat!” it giggled. 

The Admiral, who had been sat on the sofa next to Melanie through most of Jon’s explanation, leapt from his cushion and sprinted for the back of the flat, hair stood on end. 

“It’s me you want,” Jon said, doing his best to keep his voice steady. “Leave the others alone and let’s you and I settle this.”

“Archivist!” Not-Sasha’s voice rose in obscene delight. “Here I am, all ready to destroy your friends, and it turns out, you’ve shown up after all! Not very bright, are you?”

“Leave them alone,” Jon snapped. 

“Why, when I can have  _ all _ of you instead?” The door, already thin (cheapest option, he Knew, that’s how things worked with landlords), shook in its frame. Georgie had locked it, even drawn the chain across. 

“Get behind me,” said Jon to the others. It didn’t take long. A few solid bangs, a groan of wood, and the lock mechanism ripped right through the wooden doorframe (not well-built, that, the contractors had cut corners, he Knew in a flash), and the thing that had once pretended to be Sasha was through the door.

It was tall and long and spindly and all its angles were sharp. It still wore its hair as it had done in the days when it hid amongst them, short and perky, right above the holes it had for eyes and the jagged display that was its teeth. It couldn’t quite stand up straight in the low-ceilinged room, but that only meant it crouched, predatory, ready to spring.

“Oh  _ good morning _ everyone,” it sang. “Isn’t this a lovely picture?”

Said picture consisted of Melanie and Georgie holding hands, facing it down; Martin, hands apparently unconsciously formed into fists, and Jon, in front of all of them, jaw clenched. 

“Such adorable couples. Maybe me and mine will  _ be _ all of you. It’d be fun, wouldn’t it? I always did wonder if I could become the Archivist. What do you think?” it asked. 

“Get out,” Jon told it. Now the static began to buzz under his voice. 

“Or what? You’ll  _ look _ at me? Please.” It reached out, so fast that Jon barely had time to see it start to move, before the blow landed. He found himself on the floor. His ears rang. He tasted blood. Not-Sasha was laughing. 

From somewhere, Martin’s voice came through distantly. “We stopped your ritual, you know!”

A hiss. “You trifled with the Unknowing?”

“Yeah, we stopped it. Blew it up, in fact. Every last little bit. Killed Nikola, by the way. All the dancers, all the skins, all your little waxworks, your anglerfish, all gone. Exploded. Burnt to ash.”

“The Desolation? But they were meant to… Never mind!” screamed Not-Sasha. Jon’s vision was blearily coming back. He’d been tossed against the sofa. His chest hurt. It felt  _ wrong. _ Martin stood in front of the monster, Melanie and Georgie by his side. 

“We shall remake ourselves,” whispered Not-Sasha, “as we always have done. We shall find new faces and new skins. I-Do-Not-Know-You shall make the world anew and all self shall be  _ purged. _ But first, you will all suffer for what you have done.

“She was better at it than you, you know. The old woman. The old  _ Archivist. _ No matter. She got what was coming to her in the end. And the wheel goes round and round and the painted ponies go up and down, and now you’re here, and I am going to  _ enjoy this…” _

Jon pushed himself upright. Not-Sasha had stalked lazily towards Martin, clearly relishing the moment as much as the Hunt would have done. 

“I’m not afraid of you,” Georgie said suddenly.

“That is rather disappointing,” said Not-Sasha. “Takes the fun out. But killing’s killing, and who am I to refuse…” She reached for Martin, who had backed against the wall with Melanie and Georgie. 

Jon, for the second time in three days, opened the door. Beholding flooded in. He took a breath. He had to do this faster than ever before, focus the Eye out and through, but he managed, barely. Half a dozen tape recorders that had not been in the room five minutes ago turned on. He spoke. 

_ “Tell me your story, creature of the Stranger.” _

Not-Sasha spun around to face him. “How dare you? I thought I taught you not to ask prying questions.”

Every moveable camera within a five-block radius -- CCTV, webcams, even a few mobile phones -- turned to stare directly at this point, the creature in the center of his scrutiny. The television on the wall switched itself on and the only image on the screen was gray static and the voice from the speakers was Jon’s voice. The radio played, deafeningly loud. Three more tape recorders manifested, one in his hand. He punched the red RECORD button and said, in a dozen voices,  _ “Tell me!” _

Not-Sasha froze in its tracks. 

_ “Statement of the being known as NotThem, concerning its existence,”  _ said the Archivist. 

“No…” Not-Sasha began to wail. “I won’t be known!”

_ “Statement taken direct from subject…” _

“I’m…. NOT…”

_ “...by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist....” _

And he Saw. He Saw the hunger and cruelty and pain, and how many years, stalking around the edges, sweeping in to eat a life. Face after face after face in parade. It was messy, eating someone’s life. They never came cleanly. Never went without a fight. 

Centuries of masks. Centuries of smiling behind a stolen face. Of laughter and blood and gleeful, meticulous terror. Of walking into a trap one day, set by a man in a clerical collar, and dragged into the net, into the Web, trapped, trapped, trapped.

Sasha. The Archivist saw her at last. Long hair. Glasses. Nothing at all like Not-Sasha. Part of him thought,  _ I’m so sorry. _

“I won’t!” howled Not-Sasha. Its resistance snapped beneath the tide of Knowledge, beneath the onrushing statement. The Eye Watched a thing whose nature it was not to be Known. There was only one way it could end. 

And then it was over. He came back to the world, came back to himself, propped up against the edge of the sofa, the wrongness in his chest lessening by the second. What was left of Not-Sasha lay in the center of the carpet. It was twisted and shriveled and small and unmistakably, utterly dead. The television and radio shut off. 

“Statement ends,” said Jon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not-Sasha paraphrases Joni Mitchell's The Circle Game (the "painted ponies" line) because that song was playing in my head for a long time after 165. Writing Not-Sasha was a lot of fun, not gonna lie. 
> 
> All your comments keep me going, you are all wonderful <3 
> 
> And to everyone who's reading this, take care of yourself. These are wild and tremendous times and we can't take care of those around us, dismantle systemic oppression, etc., without being kind and caring to ourselves.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Martin and Jon have a very necessary talk. Then, plans are made. 
> 
> CW: strong warning in this one for thoughts and discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation. Jon is not doing well here. PLEASE take care with this, your safety and well-being are the most important thing! A super quick summary will be at the end notes for the chapter if anyone would like to to read it in that format instead. If you'd rather just skip the section in question, it starts from "Jon turned away from the statement" and ends at "At length, he squeezed Martin's hand."

They burned what was left of Not-Sasha in an alley behind the building. Georgie lit a fire in an empty rubbish bin. The shriveled remains caught and caught fast. Once again, it seemed that fire really did work against the Stranger’s creatures. 

“Could you always do that?” asked Georgie as the flames died down.

Jon shook his head. “Definitely not. That was… new.”

It had been. The Eye had moved through him even more strongly than when he’d questioned Daisy. All those years of running scared from things far tougher than himself, and now he could deal out some violence of his own. That amount of being, of Becoming, had been terrifying and wonderful. He wanted to do it again.

But there was something else he needed to tell Georgie and Melanie. “When I Knew that you all were in danger I used the Eye. I watched you, for a short time, to make sure you were okay. But it was an invasion of privacy and I’m sorry for that.”

Georgie braced a hand on Melanie’s shoulder. Melanie herself said, “This is why I don’t regret quitting the damned Institute. It always gets worse and worse there. It breaks everything it touches. This shit, it’s scary. Being watched is scary. Being attacked by a monster and then having your friend literally  _ question  _ it to death… I’m glad I’m out of it. Don’t watch us again.”

“Okay,” said Jon.

“Don’t come round for a while unless someone’s going to die,” Georgie told them. “Thanks for, you know, saving our lives. But we need some space.”

“I understand.”

“Hold on one second… what did you see?” Melanie interjected.

“You and Georgie in bed -- wait, no not like that!” stammered Jon. “Just sleeping! That’s all!”

For a moment, Georgie looked like she almost wanted to laugh. Instead, though, she put a hand on Melanie’s shoulder and turned pointedly back towards their flat. 

“Bye,” she said. “Good luck and take care.” 

“You too,” said Martin. And with that, Melanie and Georgie walked away into the light of a bright, sunny morning. 

Jon didn’t realize how much he’d missed the Archives until he entered them again. The weight of constant anxiety, of staring at the ground and not daring to talk freely with Martin for fear of being overheard, all lifted when he entered his office. 

“Cup of tea?” asked Martin. 

“I’d like to take a look at this statement first, if you don’t mind.”

“Actually, Jon, can I make tea first? I’d like to talk.”

Jon turned away from the statement he’d been about to read that morning, just before the Eye told him about Melanie and Georgie. He met Martin’s eyes. “Okay.”

He followed Martin into the corridor and to the break room, where Martin filled the electric kettle and switched it on. As the kettle made its usual churning and buzzing noises, Martin said, “First of all, that was really cool. What you did back there,  _ smiting  _ that thing.”

“Um. Thank you?” 

“Are you okay, where that thing hit you?”

His chest. The pain had been gone within minutes of taking Not-Sasha’s statement. He remembered the first time he’d realized he was physically dependent on statements, how terrified he’d been. Now they kept him alive and healed him from serious injury. He was almost numb to it, now. Almost.

“I’m okay. All healed up.”

“Jon, what you said, about blaming yourself, and some of the other things you’ve been saying over the last few days… I’ve been thinking. And I’m worried.

“I know you said we might not make it out of this alive. And I realize that, I just, I need to know if you’re trying to… you know. If you’re trying  _ not _ to make it out.”

“Martin, I don’t know what we’re getting into; I might have some better idea after I look at that statement--”

“This isn’t really about Jonah, okay? It’s about you. Jon, please. Talk to me.”

Jon took a deep breath. “Okay.”

“What’s been going on lately? You’ve had a lot to take in.”

“Yes. It’s been…” Jon struggled for words. “Bad. I’ve… When I went into the Buried, with Daisy, I told her that it might not be such a bad thing if I were trapped or killed. One less monster, you know. And I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help thinking that because I’m supposed to end the world, it’d be safer if I weren’t in the picture, somehow.

“I don’t think I’m trying to get myself hurt, deliberately. At least, not any more so than I was before. But I worry, and the idea of what I might  _ become _ if I keep on going like this, is, well, not exactly comforting. You saw what I did to Not-Sasha. She deserved it. It felt  _ great.  _ What if the next one doesn’t deserve it? 

“And I have to traumatize people to  _ survive,  _ Martin. You saw it up in Scotland. And you’ve met other avatars, and you know what they’re like. If this is what it’s like now, what happens when I stop caring that I’m hurting people?

“And that seems like where this all is going. Me not caring anymore. It scares me even more after finding out that Tim and all the others died for  _ nothing.  _ Even if we get rid of Jonah, will I become just as bad in time? And then what will have been the point of it all?”

Jon lowered his head into his hands and sighed. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t coherent.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” said Martin softly. “I’m glad you told me. Thank you.” He paused for a moment, seeming to gather himself for what to say next.

“Let me tell you something, then. I don’t have any answers. We started this and I guess we’re going to try to save the world. I  _ really _ don’t like the thought of going into this with you being in the place you’re in, especially since we might die in the process, but I don’t really see any alternative. 

“But assuming we don’t die, Jon, you and I are going to have to figure out how to  _ live.  _ That’s what I was thinking about earlier at Georgie and Melanie’s. I don’t know what that’ll look like but I want you here to find out with me.”

“Most days,” said Jon, “that’s the only thing that keeps me going. You are, I mean. And I know, I know, that’s not healthy. But, well. There it is.”

Martin wrapped his arms around Jon. “I’m going to help you. I’ll be here; we’ll work it out. Remember, you helped Daisy get back from the Hunt, and she  _ chose _ not to hurt us. We can find a way. Not saying it’ll be easy. Can you… can you try? Do you want to try?”

Jon found his answer then. “Yes. I do. I will.” 

“Okay then. Have some tea.”

Martin and Jon finished their tea. Jon lingered over every perfect sip, conscious that this could well be the last time he drank Martin’s tea. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to sit with this fear, but it was the first time since he and Martin had been properly together, and this time, he really  _ knew  _ what he might be missing.

Not if he could help it, he told himself. There would be other cups of tea, and other moments like this, Martin holding his hand. They’d talk about poetry and their fears and their loves. There would be a lifetime of Martin’s soft jumpers and brave, bright smile. Jon had no idea how, of course, and part of him still knew it was long odds against any of that ever coming to pass. Part of him still thought it might be better if he, Jon, didn’t make it back. 

He felt selfish for wanting this life, this love, because he was a monster and his existence meant pain and fear. But he wanted it anyway. 

At length, he squeezed Martin’s hand and said, “We should probably go read that statement.”

“Do you want me to check it first? In case it’s from Jonah?”

“No need.” Jon Knew this with certainty. “It’s not one from him.”

“Seems like as good a reason as any to read it.”

Together, they returned to Jon’s office. Jon tried and failed to open the folder; his hand kept twitching away involuntarily, and he managed to give himself a rather impressive papercut, enough to send Martin hurrying to the break room for a bandage. The wound closed before he even returned. Finally, Martin just made an exasperated noise and opened the folder himself.

The page was torn. Little enough of it was even legible, and that which was, had been written in old-fashioned script in faded ink. It looked as though someone had tried very hard to rip it up but had been stopped partway through. Jon hadn’t bothered to look for a tape recorder. There was already one running anyway. He began to read.

_ “Statement of a former Archival Assistant at the Magnus Institute, name illegible. Date of statement illegible. Statement is tattered and significant portions are missing or otherwise unreadable. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins. _

_ “...will set down here a faithful account, that those secrets I have so dearly bought might not be lost, for I do not believe that any true devotee of the Ceaseless Watcher is capable of destroying official statements… _

_ “...she died. A creature out of the dark came for her. I will here confess that I made no attempt to save her. Of all the revelations of the last several months, one in particular so caught my imagination: namely, that Archival Assistants have the power to resign from the Magnus Institute upon the death of the Archivist; and that information has played on my mind… _

_ “After she discovered his true identity, she proceeded to the ruins of Millbank Prison, where the body of Jonah Magnus lies. There, she related, he revealed to her that the Archivist may not... _

_ “...May God have mercy on my soul. Legible portion of statement ends.”  _

Jon exhaled slowly as he came back to himself. It always took a moment or two to recalibrate after a statement, even a fragmented one. He gathered his thoughts. “It appears that we are not the first Archival team to challenge Jonah. And there is one other way for Archival Assistants to quit the Institute.”

“Jon, no. Not like that.”

“I know, Martin. I suppose that’s why the Eye didn’t want me reading this one. It doesn’t like anyone to know about how to get out of this place. Maybe that’s why it’s partially torn up. As it is, it’s really not that useful. I’d hoped we could find something about how to kill Jonah without all of us dying.”

“He did say you and I might survive.”

“That was when you belonged to the Lonely. I don’t think that protection works anymore. And in my case, I’ve no real idea. Maybe I’ll live, but not as myself, just as the Archivist.”

“There could be another statement that’d help,” said Martin. “We could keep looking.”

Jon glanced around the room. “We could, yes. It might take a long time, though. Eventually, Jonah will figure out a way to attack us here. The Archives won’t be safe forever. Not while he’s out there.”

“What’s the plan, then?”

“If we go down there, he’ll come after us. He can’t  _ not, _ not with his body being so vulnerable there. And if he shows up as Elias, there’s a chance I could beat him. I beat Not-Sasha, after all, and I never thought I’d be able to do anything like that. I don’t know what would happen if I tried to take his statement, but it might hurt him somehow, or rip away some of his control of the Eye. I might be able to force him to tell us how to break the binding, let us kill him without killing ourselves. It’s either that or spend a very long time combing through the Archives, looking for information that may or may not be there. It’s likely he’s the only one who knows the answer to those particular questions, and he’d never make a statement about it in any case.”

Martin met Jon’s eyes. 

“Are you sure?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure this will work. I  _ am _ sure there aren’t any other viable choices here.”

Martin paused for a long moment, then finally nodded. “Okay.”

They descended through the trap door, Jon leading the way with a torch in hand, Martin close behind. Having been to the Panopticon before, Jon Knew the way effortlessly. More than that, actually: it felt like the slope of the floor pulled him to the center of the maze, like to walk away from the prison would be to fight gravity itself. He didn’t know if it was Jonah calling him there again or whether he was making his own choices this time, but either way, they were walking, hand in hand, straight into the center of Jonah’s place of power.

Beholding, apart from mapping the way for him, was silent. Jon asked, fruitlessly, a hundred variations of  _ can I defeat Jonah Magnus through compulsion?  _ and  _ how can his binding be severed? _ as they walked. But if the Eye had chosen a side, it certainly wasn’t Jon’s. 

“I really don’t like this place,” said Martin softly.

“I know,” said Jon. He wished he could say he didn’t like it either, but the part of him that was pulled here grew stronger and stronger with each step, each staircase and hallway and bend. Just as it had the first time, when he’d killed Peter Lukas and brought Martin out from the Lonely. “We’re nearly there.”

And then they were. The final hallway, an empty door frame, rotted bricks and cracked tile, and then they were in the great space of the Panopticon, all the cells standing open and empty like staring eyes, and the single chair -- a throne, for all that it it was thin and undecorated -- with a thin, dry, pale figure sat right in the center, the unbeating heart of the Institute, the high priest of the temple of the Ceaseless Watcher: Jonah Magnus, at once eyeless and all-seeing, dead and alive. 

No sign of Elias Bouchard, not at first. Just the resonant silence and an intense sense of scrutiny. Every mote of dust that fell in this place was marked and recorded. Not a shadow moved or spider spun its web without being seen and accounted for. 

Jon pulled out the knife he’d brought. He knew who was watching, who was listening. Side by side with Martin, he crossed the hall, approaching the corpse in the chair. The blade flashed even in the dim light. 

“We’ve come back, Jonah,” said Martin. “We’re here to finish what we started.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick summary: Georgie and Melanie ask Jon and Martin to leave them alone for a while in the aftermath of Jon destroying Not-Sasha. They agree and return to the Archives, where Jon and Martin discuss Jon's feelings on guilt, monsterhood, and self-destruction. Jon says he wants to try and make it through the confrontation with Jonah and have a future with Martin. Martin promises to help and support him. After some tea, they read the statement from earlier and find that it's not helpful, although it does inform them about the fact that assistants can quit the Archives if the Archivist dies. In the absence of any other viable plan, Jon proposes that he challenge Jonah and attempt to take his statement to learn about how to kill him and/or break the binding on Jon and the other Archives employees. Jon and Martin enter the tunnels and journey to the Panopticon together.
> 
> Only one more plot chapter left in this! Then chapter 9 will be an epilogue of sorts, and I hope to release both of those together! 
> 
> And last but far from least, your comments make my day, every time. Thank you all <3


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I may have lied in the end notes for the last chapter, I don't have chapter 9 finished yet but I'm going to go ahead and post this one anyway! 
> 
> CW: eye trauma, non-consensual body modification. The eye trauma is not described in extreme detail but it does happen in this chapter. A knife is involved. Mentions of blood and gore.

Martin’s voice echoed through the empty, ruined prison. There was no reply. As the seconds dragged on and silence fell, Martin turned back to Jon.

“Where is he? Can you see him?”

Jon shook his head. “I’ve no idea.” He glanced down at the knife in his hand. “If he doesn’t turn up, we might just have to take the simplest way and kill his body there. I don’t know how to find him. Maybe with the Lukases?”

“Without Peter, I don’t think he’d be welcome with them. They’re not the most welcoming lot even at the best of times.” 

Jon stared at the body of Jonah Magnus at the center of the Panopticon. Could he really go through with it, with putting Martin at risk? Or Basira, for that matter? She’d signed an employment contract too. 

Behind him, Martin said, “I could always, you know. Do what Melanie did. If we can’t find Elias. Then we could kill him and, well, warn Basira first, I guess?” His voice shook, but his gaze was determined.

Jon looked down and stared at the knife. It was all too much, the weight of all his past failures and bad decisions chasing him, and now Martin was offering to do the thing he’d once refused, back when he was still in the Lonely. Quit the Institute for good. At the time, Jon had almost managed to convince himself that it could all be that simple, both of them together and away from this place. And now… Words betrayed Jon again. He had no idea what to say. 

Instead, from behind them came another voice in reply. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

Jon and Martin turned. There was the man they’d known as Elias. The living Jonah Magnus, with his thin smile and impeccable suit. He stood in the doorway to the rest of the tunnels. Seeing him there -- the man who’d tried to use Jon to end the world, who’d manipulated and tortured him towards that goal for years, who’d let Tim and Sasha die for  _ nothing  _ \-- only accelerated the whirling in Jon’s head. He felt sick. He reached for words again and again found nothing. 

“Decided to turn up, then?” Martin asked defiantly. 

“Please. No need for dramatics.” Jonah Magnus began to walk towards them. “Killing me won’t solve your problem, not even if Martin takes his  _ precautions  _ first. 

“Jon, you’re not the first Archivist to challenge me. It’s not gone well for any of your predecessors. I’d have expected you to learn that by now. Still, I am somewhat impressed. Tell me, as a favor: how did you manage to avoid reading my statement?”

“I saw it first,” Martin snapped. 

“Did you now? I suppose this is one way you are different. None of the other Archivists had anyone like you, Martin. They all went it alone.”

Jonah’s question gave Jon pause.  _ How did you manage to avoid reading my statement?  _ He grabbed onto it, a simple, tangible point of confusion against the backdrop of loathing and terror and hurt. A Question. He could handle that. He could demand an Answer, and he did. Static vibrated through the air as he said “Why didn’t you know that already?”

Jonah blinked as the compulsion hit. “My word, Jon, you _have_ gotten stronger. Even so, it’s not as simple as that to compel another servant of our master. I will answer your question, but only because I feel that, after everything, I owe you an answer, at long last. It won’t hurt you to know.

“I saw you in the village. It was simple to find your post box address and intercepting Ms. Hussain’s shipment posed no difficulty. I even saw you pick the package up, and I will admit I was  _ quite  _ excited for the moment the world would change. Even I wasn’t sure what it would be like after we unmade reality. Naturally, I was disappointed when nothing happened.

“After that, well. I couldn’t see you anymore. I looked up and down Scotland, railway stations, airports, everywhere. No eyes would track you. Congratulations, Jon. You finally figured out how to hide from me. I didn’t even know you were in London until you entered the Institute, and I attempted a last-ditch plan to get you out of the way at Ms. Barker and Ms. King’s flat, but it seems you’ve Become quite beyond what I would have guessed. Remarkable, really.”

“But I didn’t… I wasn’t blocking you from seeing me.”

“I can assure you that you were, though perhaps unconsciously. You must have been furious with me.”

“‘Furious’ doesn’t quite cover it,” said Jon, sharp and sardonic. 

“Of course.” But Jonah was still smiling, voice as smooth and polished and smug as always. For someone admitting he’d been outmatched, he seemed terribly pleased. Alarm bells started ringing in Jon’s head. This scenario, doom hanging over his head and Jonah stood in front of him with a Cheshire-cat smirk, felt all too familiar. 

“So what’s the part you’re not telling us? What’s your master plan this time?”

“My dear Archivist, you’re not going to kill me. You can’t. Basira and, of course, Martin, would die unpleasantly, and you… at this stage, I’d hazard a guess that you might live, but all remaining traces of the person you once were will vanish. You need me to be the heart of the Ceaseless Watcher. Without me, you’d be nothing but Beholding and then, what’s to stop you from performing the ritual yourself? After all, you wouldn’t care anymore. And your world and everyone you love will be gone.

“You owe me, Jon. If I weren’t here in the Panopticon, you’d have Become much more than you are now. You certainly wouldn’t be standing here with Martin. If you want any hope of continuing your little romance, you need me.

“With that, I suggest we all return to the Institute and come to an arrangement. I’m sure we can work something out that will be mutually acceptable.”

Jon felt his fingers clench around the knife. He told himself,  _ he’s just trying to manipulate us like always.  _ Out loud he said, “Not this time, Jonah.  _ Give me your statement.” _

He reached for the door behind his eyes. It opened smoothly and the Eye flooded in. Each staring set of prison bars became eyes looking inward at the center of the room and he Saw himself and Martin and Jonah from dozens of angles: Martin standing by his side, their backs toward Jonah’s body in the Panopticon chair, and facing down Jonah, who still smiled mockingly. On top of a roar of static came the sounds of tape recorders turning on. The Watcher was here. The Archivist gazed out through its eyes, and it gazed out through his, and the air grew tight and close with their scrutiny. 

_ “Tell me --” _

The door in Jon’s mind shut, quick as blinking, so fast that it left him dizzy and reeling on his feet. He was only himself again. For a moment he could do nothing but breathe and feel the rabbit-fast pounding of his heart. He’d failed. 

When he looked up, he saw Jonah’s smile had widened. “The Archives may belong to you, but this is  _ my  _ place of power. In this place,  _ I  _ direct the Watcher’s gaze.”

“Now, if you’re finished with the histrionics, let’s return to my office. No compulsion or eye-gouging required. We’ll have ourselves a chat. You can come back as official Head Archivist, if you like. You can even keep Mr. Blackwood with you. I’ll help sort out our legal issues. There will be some new rules, of course. It’ll be in all our best interests.” He beckoned to Jon and Martin. 

What choice did they have left? It was all, thought Jon, really going to be for nothing. He and Martin would end up right back where they started and sooner or later, Jonah would slip his statement in front of Jon, and he’d read it, and fourteen terrors would devour the world…

He didn’t realize he’d taken a step forward until Martin put a hand on his shoulder. “Wait, Jon.”

He turned round. “What is it?”

Martin wore an expression that was difficult to place. There was anger in it, and fear and disgust, but also, inexplicably, triumph. 

“He’s trying to make this into a binary outcome. Kill him or do what he wants, and either way, he gets his apocalypse. But there’s a choice, Jon. There’s always a choice.”

“Not a viable one,” said Jonah, but there was something in his voice that almost sounded like alarm. “Come now, Martin.”

“A third option,” continued Martin. “Something didn’t feel right during your whole villain monologue. You weren’t lying exactly, but you certainly weren’t telling the whole truth, either. That’s the difference between knowledge and understanding.”

“I don’t see how this is relevant --”

“That bit at the end, though. You mentioned eye gouging. You’re quite practiced at it, aren’t you? Been body-hopping for a century and a half. Always watching over your Institute, that’s what you said.”

“Martin --”

“So maybe, turnabout is fair play?”

Jon would never have described himself as athletic or imposing. He’d never won, or even really threatened to win, a physical fight in his life. It was still two against one, though, and Elias Bouchard was hardly the physically intimidating type either. 

The actual process was nothing like Melanie’s surgery had been. Messier. Definitely messier. Taking them out, that is. That was the messy part. Putting them  _ back, _ though, was comparatively clean. The old sockets were dry and dusty. They still fit.

Elias Bouchard was dead. Jon had, for a brief moment, hoped… but he was gone. There’d been nothing left of him by the end.

Jonah Magnus screamed. It was a silent scream, but Jon heard it all the same. The founder of the Institute, its leader and director, now howled from the center of the Panopticon. There were no words in it. There were no words for this. 

Jon asked Beholding a question. Perhaps the Eye recognized the shift in the balance of power, or maybe it was simply that Jonah couldn’t stop him in the state he was in. Either way, the answer came through as quickly as ever. He couldn’t speak yet, though. It was all he could do to huddle with Martin on the bloody floor, both their breaths coming in ragged and choked. It was over. They’d won. 

“That was  _ awful,” _ Martin managed to say. “I just thought of it and we… we just did that.”

“I know,” said Jon. “I know.” 

Much later, Daisy and Basira found them there. They’d followed both the Eye and the Hunt down into the tunnels and to the Panopticon, hand in hand. Jon hadn’t Seen them coming. He hadn’t been looking. All he could hear was Martin’s steady breathing and Jonah still raging soundlessly, and he couldn’t bring himself to turn back to the throne of the Panopticon and look again. He didn’t even notice until Daisy and Basira were practically on top of them, at which point he and Martin both startled badly at their sudden appearance.

Daisy held out a hand.

“Come on then,” she said, lifting him up. Beside her, Basira was doing the same for Martin. “Let’s get you out of this place. Let’s get you home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry Jonah. I did promise you were going down tho.
> 
> Chapter 9 will be an epilogue! 
> 
> Thank you all again so much for your comments, they keep me going <3


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the epilogue!

A knock came on the door to the Head Archivist’s office. He’d just finished reading a statement, and he hurriedly spoke the final words of his ritual, “End recording,” and pressed the button. He closed the file and put it to one side on his cluttered desk, just next to his rib. He’d taken to using the thing as a kind of macabre paperweight.

“Come in!”

Daisy opened the door. “Don’t tell me you forgot, Sims.”

“I’m sorry. Just getting caught up on statements.”

“You good to go out in public?”

The hunger was always there these days. He was getting better at managing it. It helped to be in the Archives, surrounded by statements, even useless ones or ones he’d already read. It wasn’t easy. But today, he didn’t think he was in danger of eating anyone on the street. Besides, he had Daisy along. If he tried anything, she’d probably rip him in half. Or something.

“Yes.”

“Get your coat.” She turned and headed impatiently for the lobby.

They bought coffee. Jon refused, at this point, to drink tea that hadn’t been made by Martin, and Daisy wasn’t picky about her caffeinated beverages. As they sipped their overpriced drinks, they walked in a nearby park. Jon half-fancied he’d see the ghost of Agnes Montague, looking for Jack Barnabas. The moment of doubt and human connection that had undone an avatar of the Desolation. There were no ghosts here, Beholding supplied helpfully. 

“So.” Daisy was staring out at the street, at the trees, at the falling leaves. Anywhere but at him. “I’m not sure I thanked you for what you did.”

“You really don’t have to thank me.”

“I kind of think I want to, though. You reminded me that I had a choice. Basira came and found me and brought me the rest of the way back, but if I hadn’t known I could choose, I dunno what I would have done.”

Jon was afraid of the answer, but he had to ask, carefully, “Did it -- that is, I mean, I wonder whether it hurt?”

“Not exactly. I wouldn’t call it pleasant, but it was necessary.”

“I seem to do a lot of things like that these days. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth. For putting you through something unpleasant without your permission, necessary or not.”

“Thanks, I guess.” She fell silent as they walked. 

Eventually, Jon asked, “How has it been for you since last we talked?”

“About the same. I still… I miss it. And I’m still hungry.”

“Me too.”

“Basira thought I could try tracking down some more monsters. She’d come with to keep an eye out. Make sure I’m hunting monsters and not people, or, you know, monsters who are trying to be people.”

“Not so easy to tell the difference these days,” said Jon. And then, “I might be able to help, if you wanted.”

“How’s that?”

“I could try to Know what you were chasing, to make sure it’s really a monster.” As he said it, he wondered at what his life had become, where he was offering to use supernatural Knowledge to help a Hunter sort through her kill list. How was he even going to draw the line? By plenty of reasonable definitions, both he and Daisy fit the “monster” bill. Maybe he’d have to ask Martin and Basira for help. 

Daisy gave him an appraising look. “Is that what you can do now? Like Elias -- I mean, Jonah -- could do? Just see things about people?”

“Not quite like he can. I can’t look through representations of eyes. It’s more just Knowledge. I’ll ask the Eye and it tells me things.”

“Not sure I get the difference, if I’m honest.”

“It’s hard to explain.” Having thought of Jonah, Beholding informed him that the founder of the Magnus Institute was still caught in the prison he’d made, the prison Martin and Jon had forced him back into: omniscient and helpless in the Panopticon. He could see anything he desired. He could live forever as the heart of the Watcher. He could act on none of it.

He’d gotten, funnily enough, a version of what he’d wanted. 

It was a cruel ending, and it reminded Jon of Gertrude and her methods. He hadn’t decided how he felt about it in this instance. Maybe it would take him a while to figure out. Thinking about Jonah still made his head spin and his throat feel raw with a knot of emotions, most of which he couldn’t name. 

Daisy brought him out of it, for the moment, by saying, “All right, then. If you’re willing to help, I’ll take it.”

Jon nodded. “You’ve already helped me plenty just on these walks.”

After Martin and Jon had staggered out of the tunnels with Daisy and Basira, they’d had another talk. There was no question of Jon going to therapy as Melanie had done. As much as it had helped her, she hadn’t been nearly as deep in with the entities as Jon. He doubted a therapist would believe even a sentence of what he’d have to tell them. Besides, there was always a risk of anyone who learned about the entities getting dragged into the whole hideous mess themselves. So he’d had to look around for other options. 

Luckily, Basira and Daisy had a similar idea, and after their ordeal in the Buried together, Daisy and Jon had had a kind of quiet trust between them. It had helped immeasurably during those long months of Peter Lukas’ directorship, with Martin walking into the Lonely and both Jon and Daisy feeling the pinch of hunger and afraid of what they were becoming. 

So they’d started these weekly walks. It was one of the few times each week that Jon saw the sun. He preferred to stay in the Archives where he felt safe. Martin had helped him convert the break room into something resembling a small apartment -- he had plenty of practice -- and they both stayed there most nights. Jon was thinking of getting a cat.

It wasn’t easy. They’d known it wouldn’t be. But Jon was finding that he was glad he’d decided to try.

He said as much to Daisy as they walked. He was unpracticed at vulnerability, at letting his guard down, but he was learning.

“I’m glad too,” Daisy said. “As far as the Fears go, with being an Avatar and losing sight of being a person, I think that’s how they do it. They convince you you can’t choose.

“But we can. We both of us chose to try again in our own ways.”

Their path led them at last back to the Institute. Daisy didn’t come in; she was meeting Basira on the other side of town. Jon waved her goodbye on the steps of the Institute. Then he turned and opened the door.

As always, the feeling of being Watched swept over him like an ocean wave. It was almost comforting these days. Not quite as comforting as the Archives, but close. 

He gave Rosie a quick smile as he passed the reception desk. She gave him a little wave in return. Then, “Oh Jon? Director was asking for you.” She said it with a wry grin. 

“I’d better hurry then,” he replied. Rather than head down the staircase to the Archives, he climbed up instead, to the third-floor director’s office. He passed signs and corridors leading to the library and the research department. Many of the former staff had left with the recent upheaval, especially after the first incident at the Panopticon. They hadn’t been recruiting to replace them. Funding from the Lukases had dried up and the Institute’s budget wasn’t what it used to be. 

No matter. It was just as well that fewer people worked here. Fewer to potentially get caught up with the Eye. 

The door to the Director’s office had recently had its nameplate removed. Where Elias’ name, and then Peter’s, had once been fixed to the wall, the only signage now simply read: “Director.” Jon knocked softly. 

The door swung open and Martin stood there, smiling with that familiar, beautiful, bright expression. 

“You wanted to see me?” asked Jon.

“Oh yes, I asked Rosie to send you up,” Martin said, putting on a show of mock pompousness. “Come in, won’t you?”

The office had been redecorated substantially since Peter’s tenure. Peter had left it barren and unwelcoming, as befitted an avatar of the Lonely. Martin had installed several new chairs and even a worn old sofa against the wall opposite his desk. The place was a bit of a mess currently, as they were still sorting through all the boxes of files that the previous directors had left behind. There had been several rather interesting statements tucked in amongst the spreadsheets and lists of inventory.

Jon took one of the plush chairs next to the desk. “How did the call with Simon Fairchild go?”

Martin made a face. “About as you’d expect. Still, he’s agreed to some funding. Enough to keep Artefact Storage running, at least.”

“Let me know if I can help at all.”

“If I need any blackmail material, I know where to find you. Did you meet up with Daisy?”

“Yes. It went okay. She’s considering starting up monster hunting again. I offered to help make sure it’s really monsters she’s after.”

“That’s good.” He reached out and gave Jon’s shoulder a squeeze. 

“What now?”

“Keep going, I suppose. Can’t afford to let Artefact Storage or the Archives shutter, so we’ll just carry on. I don’t think I’ll be asking anyone to sign any contracts as your assistant, though.”

“Aren’t you and Basira still technically on the Archives payroll?”

“Okay, if you want to get technical, I’m also the head of the Institute and your boss.”

“Are you going to give me a performance review?”

“Satisfactory all round, I’d say. Keep up the good work.”

Jon shifted in the chair, Matin moved in, and they both ended up tangled on the chair together. Jon rested his head against Martin’s shoulder. He let his eyes close halfway. His thoughts drifted, not to the door at the back of his mind, but right here in this place, this time. 

_ It began with Fear. _

_ Fear is a versatile thing. It can prey on nearly anything, but most particularly Love -- Fear of its closeness, Fear of its vulnerability, Fear of its loss.  _

_ On this day, the Archivist held his love close in spite of Fear. A fifteenth terror shifted and slouched inexorably towards Being. A creature of the Watcher waited at the center of a prison for the slightest lapse in vigilance that might let it slip through the bars. Closer to home, a spider spun its web in the corner of the room. The Archivist Saw these things, and knew they would have to face them some day. But in this moment, for as long as he could -- _

Jon chose to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read this. Triple thank you to all you lovely commenters -- honestly it's unlikely I would have finished this without you. This is the first actual finished story I've ever posted publicly so it's meant a lot to me to have so many people see it, and all your feedback has been incredible <3 <3 <3 forever.
> 
> Considering writing a different AU in the not-too-distant future because I still have a lot of Feelings about TMA that need working through. For now, though, I'll leave you with some hopeful Jonmartin. 
> 
> I hope each and every person reading this knows that you (yes you personally) are amazing and beautiful.


End file.
